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STRAY STUDIES 



FROM 



ENGLAND AND ITALY 



By JOHN RICHARD GREEN, 

AUTHOR OF "A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE." 





NEW YORK: 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHER 

FRANKLIN SQUARE. 

1876. 



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PREFACE. 



I have to thank the editors of Maemillanh 
Magazine and the Saturday Review for allowing 
me to reprint most of the papers in this series. 
In many cases, however, I have greatly changed 
their original form. A few pages will be found 
to repeat what I have already said in my " Short 
History." 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

A Brother of the Poor 9 

Sketches in Sunshine: 

I.Cannes and St. Honorat 33 

II. Carnival on the Cornice 44 

III. Two Pirate Towns of the Riviera 56 

IV. The Winter Retreat 66 

V. San Remo 73 

The Poetry of Wealth 85 

Lambeth and the Archbishops 99 

Children by the Sea 149 

The Florence of Dante 161 

Buttercups 177 

Abbot and Town 187 

Hotels in the Clouds 213 

iENEAS: A VlRGILIAN STUDY 227 

Two Venetian Studies: 

I. Venice and Rome 253 

II. Venice and Tintoretto 262 

The District Visitor 273 

The Early History of Oxford 287 

The Home of our Angevin Kings 311 

Capri 331 

Capri and its Roman Remains 340 

The Feast of the Coral-fishers 354 



A BROTHER OF THE POOR. 



A BROTHER OF THE POOR. 



There are few stiller things than the stillness of a 
summer's noon such as this, a summer's noon in a 
broken woodland, with the deer asleep in the bracken, 
and the twitter of birds silent in the coppice, and hard- 
ly a leaf astir in the huge beeches that fling their cool 
shade over the grass. Afar oif a gilded vane flares out 
above the gray Jacobean gables of Knoll, the chime of 
a village clock falls faintly on the ear; but there is 
no voice or footfall of living thing to break the silence 
as I turn over leaf after leaf of the little book I have 
brought with me from the bustle of town to this still 
retreat — a book that is the record of a broken life, of a 
life " broken off," as he who lived it says of another, 
" with a ragged edge." 

It is a book that carries' one far from the woodland 
stillness around into the din and turmoil of cities and 
men, into the misery and degradation of "the East 
End" — that "London without London," as some one 
called it the other day. Few regions are more un- 
known than the Tower Hamlets. Not even Mrs. Rid- 



10 STRAY STUDIES. 

dell has ventured as yet to cross the border which parts 
the City from their weltering mass of busy life, their 
million of hard workers packed together in endless rows 
of monotonous streets, broken only by ship-yard or fac- 
tory or huge breweries — streets that stretch away east- 
ward from Aldgate to the Essex marshes. And yet, 
setting aside the poetry of life which is everywhere, 
there is poetry enough in East London ; poetry in the 
great river which washes it on the south, in the fretted 
tangle of cordage and mast that peeps over the roofs 
of Shad well, or in the great hulls moored along the 
wharves of Wapping; poetry in the "Forest" that 
fringes it to the east, in the few glades that remain of 
Epping and Hainault — glades ringing with the shouts 
of school-children out for their holiday and half mad 
with delight at the sight of a flower or a butterfly ; po- 
etry of the present in the work and toil of these acres 
of dull bricks and mortar where every body, man, wom- 
an, and child, is a worker, this England without a " lei- 
sure class ;" poetry in the thud of the steam-engine and 
the white trail of steam from the tall sugar-refinery, in 
the blear eyes of the Spitalfields weaver, or the hunger- 
ing faces of the group of laborers clustered from morn- 
ing till night round the gates of the docks and watch- 
ing for the wind that brings the ships up the river; po- 
etry in its past, in strange, old-fashioned squares, in 
quaint, gabled houses, in gray village churches, that 
have been caught and overlapped and lost, as it were, 
in the creat human advance that has carried London 



A BROTHER OF THE POOR. 11 

forward from Whitechapel, its limit in the age of the 
Georges, to Stratford, its bound in that of Victoria. 

Stepney is a belated village of this sort ; its gray old 
church of St. Dunstan, buried as it is now in the very 
heart of East London, stood hardly a century ago among 
the fields. All round it lie tracts of human life with- 
out a past; but memories cluster thickly round "Old 
Stepney," as the people call it with a certain fond rev- 
erence — memories of men like Erasmus and Colet, and 
the group of scholars in whom the Reformation began. 
It was to the country house of the Dean of St. Paul's, 
hard by the old church of St. Dunstan, that Erasmus 
betook him when tired of the smoke and din of town. 
" I come to drink your fresh air, my Colet," he writes, 
" to drink yet deeper of your rural peace." The fields 
and hedges through which Erasmus loved to ride re- 
mained fields and hedges within living memory : only 
forty years ago a Londoner took his Sunday outing 
along the field path which led past the London Hospital 
to what was still the suburban village church of Stepney. 
But the fields through which the path led have their 
own church now, with its parish of dull straight streets 
of monotonous houses already marked with premature 
decay, and here and there alleys haunted by poverty 
and disease and crime. 

There is nothing marked about either church or dis- 
trict ; their character and that of their people are of the 



12 STRAY STUDIES. 

commonest East-end type. If I ask my readers to fol- 
low me to this parish of St. Philip, it is simply because 
these dull streets and alleys were chosen by a brave and 
earnest man as the scene of his work among the poor. 
It was here that Edward Denison settled in the autumn 
of 1867, in the second year of the great " East London 
Distress." In the October of 1869, he left England on 
a fatal voyage from which lie was never to return. The 
collection of his letters which has been recently printed 
by Sir Baldwyn Leighton has drawn so much attention 
to the work which lay within the narrow bounds of 
those two years, that I may perhaps be pardoned for re- 
calling my own memories of one whom it is hard to 
forget. 

A few words are enough to tell the tale of his earlier 
days. Born in 1840, the son of a bishop, and nephew 
of the late Speaker of the House of Commons, Edward 
Denison passed from Eton to Christchurch, and was 
forced, after quitting the university, to spend some time 
in foreign travel by the delicacy of his health. His 
letters give an interesting picture of his mind during 
this pause in an active life — a pause which must have 
been especially distasteful to one whose whole bent lay 
from the first in the direction of practical energy. " I 
believe," he says in his later days, " that abstract polit- 
ical speculation is my metier /" but few minds were in 
reality less inclined to abstract speculation. From the 
very first, one sees in him what one may venture to call 



A BROTHER OF THE POOR. 13 

the best kind of " Whig " mind — that peculiar temper 
of fairness and moderation which declines to push con- 
clusions to extremes, and recoils instinctively when opin- 
ion is extended beyond its proper bound. His comment 
on Newman's "Apologia" paints his real intellectual 
temper with remarkable precision. " I left off reading 
Newman's i Apologia' before I got to the end, tired of 
the ceaseless changes of the writer's mind, and vexed 
with his morbid scruples — perhaps, too, having got a 
little out of harmony myself with the feelings of the 
author, whereas I began by being in harmony with 
them. I don't quite know whether to esteem it a bless- 
ing or a curse ; but whenever an opinion to which I am 
a recent convert, or which I do not hold with the entire 
force of my intellect, is forced too strongly upon me, 
or driven home to its logical conclusion, or overpraised, 
or extended beyond its proper limits, I recoil instinctive- 
ly, and begin to gravitate toward the other extreme, 
sure to be, in turn, repelled by it also." 

I dwell on this temper of his mind because it is this 
practical and moderate character of the man which 
gives such weight to the very sweeping conclusions on 
social subjects to which he was driven in his later days. 
A judgment which condemns the whole system of poor- 
laws, for instance, falls with very different weight from 
a mere speculative theorist and from a practical observer 
whose mind is constitutionally averse from extreme con- 
clusions. Throughout, however, we see this intellectual 



14 STRAY STUDIES. 

moderation jostling with a moral fervor which feels 
restlessly about for a fitting sphere of action. "Keal 
life," he writes from Madeira, " is not dinner parties 
and small talk, nor even croquet and dancing." There 
is a touch of exaggeration in phrases like these which 
need not blind us to the depth and reality of the feel- 
ing which they imperfectly express, a feeling which 
prompted the question which embodies the spirit of all 
these earlier letters — the question, " What is my work V ' 

The answer to this question was found both within 
and without the questioner. Those who were young 
in the weary days of Palmerstonian rule will remember 
the disgust at purely political life which was produced 
by the bureaucratic inaction of the time ; and we can 
hardly wonder that, like many of the finer minds among 
his contemporaries, Edward Denison turned from the 
political field, which was naturally open to him, to the 
field of social effort. His tendency in this direction 
was aided, no doubt, partly by the intensity of his re- 
ligious feeling, and of his consciousness of the duty he 
owed to the poor, and partly by that closer sympathy 
with the physical suffering around us which is one of 
the most encouraging characteristics of the day. Even 
in the midst of his outburst of delight at a hard frost 
("I like," he says, "the bright sunshine that general-' 
ly accompanies it, the silver landscape, and the ringing 
distinctness of sounds in the frozen air"), we see him 
haunted f>y a sense of the way in which his pleasure 



A BROTHER OF THE POOR. 15 

contrasts with the winter misery of the poor. " I would 
rather give up all the pleasures of the frost than indulge 
them, poisoned as they are by the misery of so many 
of our brothers. What a monstrous thing it is that, 
in the richest country in the world, large masses of the 
population should be condemned annually to starvation 
and death !" It is easy to utter protests like these in 
the spirit of a mere sentimentalist; it is less easy to 
carry them out into practical effort, as Edward Denison 
resolved to dOi After an unsatisfactory attempt to act 
as almoner for the Society for the Kelief of Distress, 
he resolved to fix himself personally in the East End 
of London, and study the great problem of pauperism 
face to face. 

His resolve sprung from no fit of transient enthusi- 
asm, but from a sober conviction of the need of such a 
step. " There are hardly any residents in the East rich 
enough to give much money, or with enough leisure to 
give much time," he says. " This is the evil. Even the 
best - disposed in the West don't like coming so far off, 
and, indeed, few have the time to spare ; and when they 
do, there is great waste of time and energy on the jour- 
ney. My plan is the only really practicable one ; and 
as I have the means, time, and inclination, I should be 
a thief and a murderer if I withheld what I so evident- 
ly owe." In the autumn of 1867 he carried out his 
resolve, and took lodgings in the heart of the parish 
which I sketched in the opening of this paper. If any 



16 STRAY STUDIES. 

romantic dreams had mixed with his resolution, they at 
once faded away before the dull, commonplace reality. 
"I saw nothing very striking at Stepney," is his first 
comment on the sphere he had chosen. But he was 
soon satisfied with his choice. He took up in a quiet, 
practical way the work he found closest at hand. "All 
is yet in embryo, but it will grow. Just now I only 
teach in a night school, and do what in me lies in look- 
ing after the sick, keeping an eye upon nuisances and 
the like, seeing that the local authorities keep up to 
their work. I go to-morrow before the board at the 
work-house to compel the removal to the infirmary of a 
man who ought to have been there already. I shall 
drive the sanitary inspector to put the act against over- 
crowding in force." Homely work of this sort grows 
on him ; we see him in these letters getting boys out to 
sea, keeping school with little urchins — "demons of mis- 
rule" who tried his temper — gathering round him a 
class of working-men, organizing an evening club for 
boys. All this, too, quietly and unostentatiously, and 
with as little resort as possible to " cheap charity," as he 
used to call it, to the " doles of bread and meat which 
only do the work of poor-rates." 

So quiet and simple indeed was his work that, though 
it went on in the parish of which I then had the charge, 
it was some little time before I came to know personal- 
ly the doer of it. It is amusing even now to recollect 
my first interview with Edward Denison. A vicar's 



A BROTHER OF THE POOR. 17 

Monday morning is never the pleasantest of awaken- 
ings, but the Monday morning of an East- end vicar 
brings worries that far eclipse the mere headache and 
dyspepsia of his rural brother. It is the " parish morn- 
ing." All the complicated machinery of a great eccle- 
siastical, charitable, and educational organization has 
got to be wound up afresh, and set going again for an- 
other week. The superintendent of the Women's Mis- 
sion is waiting with a bundle of accounts, complicated 
as only ladies' accounts can be. The church- warden 
has come with a face full of gloom to consult on the 
falling off in the offertory. The Scripture-reader has 
brought his "visiting-book" to be inspected, and a spe- 
cial report on the character of a doubtful family in the 
parish. The organist drops in to report something 
wrong in the pedals. There is a letter to be written to 
the inspector of nuisances, directing his attention to cer- 
tain odoriferous drains in Pig-and-Whistle Alley. The 
nurse brings her sick-list and her little bill for the sick- 
kitchen. The school-master wants a fresh pupil-teacher, 
and discusses nervously the prospects of his scholars in 
the coming inspection. There is the interest on the 
penny bank to be calculated, a squabble in the choir to 
be adjusted, a district visitor to be replaced, reports to 
be drawn up for the Bishop's Fund and a great charita- 
ble society, the curate's sick-list to be inspected, and a 
prea6her to be found for the next church festival. 

It was in the midst of a host of worries such as these 

2 



18 STRAY STUDIES. 

that a card was laid on my table with a name which I 
recognized as that of a young layman from the West 
End who had for two or three months past been work- 
ing in the mission district attached to the parish. Now, 
whatever shame is implied in the confession, I had a 
certain horror of " laymen from the West End." Lay 
co-operation is an excellent thing in itself, and one of 
my best assistants was a letter-sorter in the post-office 
close by ; but the " layman from the West End," with a 
bishop's letter of recommendation in his pocket and a 
head full of theories about " heathen masses," was an 
unmitigated nuisance. I had a pretty large experience 
of these gentlemen, and my one wish in life was to have 
no more. Some had a firm belief in their own elo- 
quence, and were zealous for a big room and a big con- 
gregation. I £ot them the bi^ room, but I was obliged 
to leave the big congregation to their own exertions, 
and in a month or two their voices faded away. Then 
there was the charitable layman, who pounced down on 
the parish from time to time, and threw about meat and 
blankets till half of the poor were demoralized. Or 
there was the statistical layman, who went about with a 
note-book, and did spiritual and economical sums in the 
way of dividing the number of "people in the free 
seats" by the number of bread-tickets annually distrib- 
uted. There was the layman with a passion for home- 
opathy, the ritualistic layman, the layman with a mania 
for preaching down trades -unions, the layman with an 
educational mania. All, however, agreed in one point, 



A BROTHER OF THE POOR. 19 

much as they differed in others ; and the one point was 
that of a perfect belief in their individual nostrums, and 
perfect contempt for all that was already doing in the 
neighborhood. 

It was with no peculiar pleasure, therefore, that I 
rose to receive this fresh " layman from the West ;" but 
a single glance was enough to show me that my visitor 
was a man of very different stamp from his predeces- 
sors. There was something in the tall, manly figure, 
the bright smile, the frank, winning address of Edward 
Denison that inspired confidence in a moment. "I 
come to learn, and not to teach," he laughed, as I hinted 
at " theories " and their danger ; and our talk soon fell 
on a certain "John's Place," where he thought there 
was a great deal to be learned. In five minutes more 
we stood in the spot which interested him — an alley 
running between two mean streets, and narrowing at 
one end till we crept out of it as if through the neck of 
a bottle. It was by no means the choicest part of the 
parish : the drainage was imperfect, the houses misera- 
ble ; but, wretched as it was, it was a favorite haunt of 
the poor, and it swarmed with inhabitants of very vari- 
ous degrees of respectability. Coster-mongers abound- 
ed, strings of barrows were drawn up on the pavement, 
and the refuse of their stock lay rotting in the gutter. 
Drunken sailors and Lascars from the docks rolled 
along, shouting to its houses of ill-fame. There was lit- 
tle crime, though one of the " ladies " of the alley was a 



20 STRAY STUDIES. 

well-known receiver of stolen goods; but there was a 
good deal of drunkenness and vice. Now and then a 
wife came plumping on to the pavement from a win- 
dow overhead ; sometimes a couple of viragoes fought 
out their quarrel "on the stones;" boys idled about in 
the sunshine, in training to be pickpockets; miserable 
girls flaunted in dirty ribbons at night-fall at half a 
dozen doors. 

But, with all this, the place was popular with even 
respectable working-people, in consequence of the small 
size and cheapness of the houses — for there is nothing 
the poor like so much as a house to themselves ; and the 
bulk of its population consisted of casual laborers, who 
gathered every morning round the great gates of the 
docks, waiting to be " called in " as the ships came up 
to unload. The place was naturally unhealthy, constant- 
ly haunted by fever, and had furnished some hundred 
cases in the last visitation of cholera. The work done 
among them in the " cholera time " had never been for- 
gotten by the people ; and, ill-famed as the place was, I 
visited it at all times of the day and night with perfect 
security. The apostle, however, of John's Place was my 
friend the letter-sorter. He had fixed on it as his spe- 
cial domain, and, with a little aid from others, had 
opened a Sunday-school and simple Sunday services in 
the heart of it. A branch of the Women's Mission was 
established in the same spot, and soon women were 
" putting by " their pence and sewing quietly round the 



A BROTHER OF THE POOR. 21 

lady superintendent as she read to them the stories of 
the Gospels. 

It was this John's Place which Edward Denison 
chose as the centre of his operations. There was very 
little in his manner to show his sense of the sacrifice he 
was making, though the sacrifice was, in reality, a great 
one. No one enjoyed more keenly the pleasures of life 
and society: he was a good oarsman, he delighted in 
outdoor exercise, and skating was to him " a pleasure 
only rivaled in my affection by a ride across country on 
a good horse." But, month after month, these pleasures 
were quietly put aside for his work in the East End. 
" I have come to this," he says, laughingly, " that a walk 
along Piccadilly is a most exhilarating and delightful 
treat. I don't enjoy it above once in ten days, but 
therefore with double zest." What told on him most 
was the physical depression induced by the very look of 
these vast, monotonous masses of sheer poverty. " My 
wits are getting blunted," he says, "by the monotony 
and ugliness of this place. I can almost imagine, diffi- 
cult as it is, the awful effect upon a human mind of 
never seeing any thing but the meanest and vilest of 
men and men's works, and of complete exclusion from 
the sight of God and his works — a position in which the 
villager never is." But there was worse than physical 
degradation. " This summer there is not so very much 
actual suffering for want of food, nor from sickness. 
What is so bad is the habitual condition of this mass of 



22 STRAY STUDIES. 

humanity — its uniform mean level, the absence of any 
thing more civilizing than a grinding-organ to raise the 
ideas beyond the daily bread and beer, the utter want 
of education, the complete indifference to religion, with 
the fruits of all this — improvidence, dirt, and their sec- 
ondaries, crime and disease." 

Terrible, however, as these evils were, he believed 
they could be met; and the quiet good sense of his 
character was shown in the way in which he met them. 
His own residence in the East End was the most effect- 
ive of protests against that severance of class from class 
in which so many of its evils take their rise. When 
speaking of the overcrowding and the official ill-treat- 
ment of the poor, he says truly, " These are the sort of 
evils which, where there are no resident gentry, grow to 
a height almost incredible, and on which the remedial 
influence of the mere presence of a gentleman known 
to be on the alert is inestimable." But nothing, as I 
often had occasion to remark, could be more judicious 
than his interference on behalf of the poor, or more un- 
like the fussy impertinence of the philanthropists who 
think themselves born " to expose " boards of guardians. 
His aim throughout was to co-operate with the guardi- 
ans in giving, not less, but greater effect to the poor- 
laws, and in resisting the sensational writing and reck- 
less abuse which aim at undoing their work. "The 
gigantic subscription lists which are regarded as signs 
of our benevolence," he says truly, " are monuments of 
our indifference." 



A BROTHER OF THE POOR. 23 

The one hope for the poor, he believed, lay not in 
charity, but in themselves. "Build school-houses, pay 
teachers, give prizes, frame workmen's clubs, help them 
to help themselves, lend them your brains; but give 
them no money, except what you sink in such under- 
takings as above." This is not the place to describe 
or discuss the more detailed suggestions with which he 
faced the great question of poverty and pauperism in 
the East End ; they are briefly summarized in a remark- 
able letter which he addressed in 1869 to an East-end 
newspaper : " First, we must so discipline and regulate 
our charities as to cut off the resources of the habitu- 
al mendicant. Secondly, all who by begging proclaim 
themselves destitute must be taken at their word. They 
must be taken up and kept at penal work — not for one 
morning, as now, but for a month or two ; a proportion 
of their earnings being handed over to them on dismiss- 
al, as capital on which to begin a life of honest industry. 
Thirdly, we must promote the circulation of labor, and 
obviate morbid congestions of the great industrial cen- 
tres. Fourthly, we must improve the condition of the 
agricultural poor." Stern as such suggestions may seem, 
there are few who have really thought as well as work- 
ed for the poor without feeling that sternness of this 
sort is, in the highest sense, mercy. Ten years in the 
East of London had brought me to the same conclu- 
sions; and my Utopia, like Edward Denison's, lay whol- 
ly in a future to be worked out by the growing intelli- 
gence and thrift of the laboring classes themselves. 



24 STRAY STUDIES. 

But stern as were his theories, there is hardly a home 
within his district that has not some memory left of 
the love and tenderness of his personal charity. , I 
hardly like to tell how often I have seen the face of 
the sick and dying brighten as he drew near, or how 
the little children, as they flocked out of school, would 
run to him shouting his name for very glee. For the 
Sunday-school was soon transformed by his efforts into 
a day-school for children, whose parents were really 
unable to pay school -fees; and a large school -room, 
erected near John's Place, was filled with dirty little 
scholars. Here, too, he gathered round him a class of 
working-men, to whom he lectured on the Bible every 
Wednesday evening; and here he delivered addresses 
to the clock-laborers, whom he had induced to attend, 
of a nature somewhat startling to those who talk of 
" preaching down to the intelligence of the poor." I 
give the sketch of one of these sermons (on " Not for- 
saking the assembling of yourselves together") in his 
own words: "I presented Christianity as a society; in- 
vestigated the origin of societies, the family, the tribe, 
the nation, with the attendant expanded ideas of rights 
and duties ; the common weal, the bond of union, ris- 
ing from the family dinner-table to the sacrificial rites 
of the national gods ; drew parallels with trades-unions 
and benefit clubs, and told them flatly they would not 
be Christians till they were communicants." No doubt, 
this will seem to most sensible people extravagant 
enough,. even without the quotations from "Wordsworth, 



A BROTHER OF THE POOR. 25 

Tennyson, and even Pope" with which his addresses 
were enlivened ; bnt I must confess that my own expe- 
rience among the poor agrees pretty much with Edward 
Denison's, and that I believe "high thinking" put into 
plain English to be more likely to tell on a dock-yard 
laborer than all the "simple Gospel sermons" in the 
world. 

His real power, however, for good among the poor 
lay not so much in what he did as in what he was. It 
is in no spirit of class self-sufficiency that he dwells 
again and again throughout these letters on the ad- 
vantages to such a neighborhood of the presence of a 
" gentleman " in the midst of it. He lost little, in the 
end he gained much, by the resolute stand he made 
against the indiscriminate alms-giving which has done 
so mnch to create and encourage pauperism in the East 
of London. The poor soon came to understand the man 
who was as liberal with his sympathy as he was chary 
of meat and coal tickets, who only aimed at being their 
friend, at listening to their troubles, and aiding them 
with counsel, as if he were one of themselves, at putting 
them in the way of honest work, at teaching their chil- 
dren, at protecting them with a perfect courage and 
chivalry against oppression and wrong. He instinctive- 
ly appealed, in fact, to their higher nature, and such an 
appeal seldom remains unanswered. In the roughest 
coster- monger there is a vein of real nobleness, often 
even of poetry, in which lies the whole chance of his ris- 



26 STRAY STUDIES. 

ing to a better life. I remember, as an instance of the 
way in which such a vein can be touched, the visit of a 
lady, well known for her work in the poorer districts of 
London, to a low alley in this very parish. She entered 
the little mission -room with a huge basket, filled not 
with groceries or petticoats, but with roses. There was 
hardly one pale face among the women bending over 
their sewing that did not flush with delight as she dis- 
tributed her gifts. Soon, as the news spread down the 
alley, rougher faces peered in at window and door, and 
great " navvies " and dock-laborers put out their hard 
fists for a rose-bud with the shyness and delight of 
school-boys. " She was a real lady," was the unanimous 
verdict of the alley. Like Edward Denison, she had 
somehow discovered that man does not live by bread 
alone, and that the communion of rich and poor is not 
to be found in appeals to the material, but to the spirit- 
ual, side of man. 

"What do you look on as the greatest boon that has 
been conferred on the poorer classes in later years?" 
said a friend to me one day, after expatiating on the 
rival claims of schools, missions, shoe -black brigades, 
and a host of other philanthropic efforts for their assist- 
ance. I am afraid I sunk in his estimation when I an- 
swered, " Sixpenny photographs." But any one who 
knows w T hat the worth of family affection is among the 
lower classes, and who has seen the array of little por- 
traits stuck over a laborer's fire-place, still gathering to- 



A BROTHER OF THE POOR. 27 

gether into one the " home " that life is always parting 
— the boy that has "gone to Canada," the girl "out at 
service," the little one with the golden hair that sleeps 
under the daisies, the old grandfather in the country — 
will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the 
tendencies, social and industrial, which every day are 
sapping the healthier family affections, the sixpenny 
photograph is doing more for the poor than all the phi- 
lanthropists in the world. 

It is easy, indeed, to resolve on "helping" the poor, 
but it is far less easy to see clearly how we can help 
them — what is real aid, and what is mere degradation. 
I know few books where any one who is soberly facing 
questions like these can find more help than in the 
"Letters" of Edward Denison. Broken and scattered 
as his hints necessarily appear, the main lines along 
which his thought moves are plain enough. He would 
discriminate between temporary and chronic distress, 
between the poverty caused by a sudden revolution of 
trade and permanent destitution such as that of Bethnal 
Green. The first requires exceptional treatment; the 
second, a rigid and universal administration of the poor- 
laws. "Bring back the poor-law," he repeats again 
and again, " to the spirit of its institution ; organize a 
sufficiently elastic labor-test, without which no outdoor 
relief to be given ; make the few alterations which al- 
tered times demand, and impose every possible discour- 
ager.ient on private benevolence." The true cure for 



28 STRAY STUDIES. 

pauperism lies in the growth of thrift among the poor. 
"I am not drawing the least upon my imagination 
when I say that a young man of twenty could in five 
years, even as a dock-laborer, which is much the lowest 
employment and least well paid there is, save about 
twenty pounds. This is not exactly Utopia; it is within 
the reach of nearly every man, if quite at the bottom of 
the tree ; but if it were of any thing like common oc- 
currence, the destitution and disease of this life would 
be within manageable limits." 

I know that words like these are in striking contrast 
with the usual public opinion on the subject, as well as 
with the mere screeching over poverty in which senti- 
mentalists are in the habit of indulging. But it is fair 
to say that they entirely coincide with my own expe- 
rience. The sight which struck me most in Stepney 
was one which met my eyes when I plunged by sheer 
accident into the back yard of a jobbing carpenter, 
and came suddenly upon a neat greenhouse with fine 
flowers inside it. The man had built it with his 
own hands and his own savings; and the sight of it 
had so told on his next-door neighbor — a cobbler, if 
I remember rightly — as to induce him to leave off 
drinking, and build a rival greenhouse with savings 
of his own. Both had become zealous florists, and 
thrifty, respectable men ; but the thing which surprised 
both of them most was that they had been able to save 
at all. 



A BROTHER OF THE POOR. 29 

It is in the letters themselves, however, rather than 
in these desultory comments of mine, that the story of 
these two years of earnest combat with the great prob- 
lem of our day must be studied. Short as the time 
was, it was broken by visits to France, to Scotland, to 
Guernsey, and by his election as Member of Parliament 
for the borough of Newark. But even these visits and 
his new Parliamentary position were meant to be parts 
of an effort for the regeneration of our poorer classes. 
His careful examination of the thrift of the peasantry 
of the Channel Islands, his researches into the actual 
working of the "Assistance Publique " in Paris, the one 
remarkable speech he delivered in Parliament on the 
subject of vagrancy, were all contributions to this great 
end. In the midst of these labors, a sudden attack of 
his old disease forced him to leave England on a long 
sea-voyage, and within a fortnight of his landing in 
Australia he died at Melbourne. His portrait hangs 
in the school which he built ; and rough faces, as they 
gaze at it, still soften even into tears as they think of 
Edward Denison. 



SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE. 



SKETCHES IN SUNSHINE 



CANNES AND ST. HONORAT. 



In a colloquial sort of way, we talk glibly enough of 
leaving England ; but England is by no means an easy 
country to leave. If it bids ns farewell from the cliffs 
of Dover, it greets ns again on the quay of Calais. It 
would be a curious morning's amusement to take a map 
of Europe, and mark with a dot of red the settlements 
of our lesser English colonies. A thousand Englands 
would crop up along the shores of the Channel or in 
quiet nooks of Normandy; around moldering Breton 
castles or along the banks of the Loire; under the 
shadow of the Maritime Alps or the Pyrenees ; beneath 
the white walls of Tunis or the Pyramids of the Nile. 
During the summer, indeed, England is everywhere — 
fishing in the fiords of Norwav, sketching on the Krem- 
lin, shooting brigands in Albania, yachting among the 
Cyclades, lion -hunting in the Atlas, crowding every 
steamer on the Rhine, annexing Switzerland, loun- 
ging through Italian galleries, idling in the gondolas 

3 



34 STRAY STUDIES. 

of Venice. But even winter is far from driving En- 
gland home again ; what it really does is to concentrate 
it in a hundred little Britains along the sunny shores 
of the South. Each winter resort brings home to us 
the power of the British doctor. It is he who rears 
pleasant towns at the foot of the Pyrenees, and lines 
the sunny coasts of the Riviera with villas that gleam 
white among the olive-groves. It is his finger that stirs 
the camels of Algeria, the donkeys of Palestine, the 
Nile boats of Egypt. At the first frosts of November 
the doctor marshals his wild geese for their winter 
Hitting, and the long train streams off, grumbling but 
obedient, to the little Britains of the South. 

Of these little Britains, none is more lovely than 
Cannes. The place is a pure creation of the health- 
seekers whose gay villas are thrown fancifully .about 
among its sombre fir- woods, though the " Old Town," as 
it is called nowadays, remains clinging to its original 
height, street above street leading up to a big bare 
church of the Renascence period, to fragments of me- 
diaeval walls and a great tower which crowns the sum- 
mit of the hill. At the feet of this height lie the two 
isles of Lerins, set in the bine waters of the bay ; on the 
east the eye ranges over the porphyry hills of Napoul to 
the huge masses of the Estrelles ; landward a tumbled 
country, with bright villas dotted over it, rises gently 
to the Alps. As a strictly winter resort, Cannes is far 
too exposed for the more delicate class of invalids ; as a 



CANNES AND ST. HONOKAT. 35 

spring resort, it is without a rival. Nowhere is the air 
so bright and elastic, the light so wonderfully brilliant 
and diffused. The very soil, full of micaceous frag- 
ments, sparkles at our feet. Color takes a depth, as 
well as a refinement, strange even to the Riviera ; no- 
where is the sea so darkly purple, nowhere are the tones 
of the distant hills so delicate and evanescent, nowhere 
are the sunsets so sublime. The scenery around har- 
monizes in its gayety, its vivacity, its charm, with this 
brightness of air and light. There is little of grandeur 
about it, little to compare in magnificence with the 
huge background of the cliffs behind Mentone, or the 
mountain wall which rises so steeply from its lemon- 
groves. But everywhere there is what Mentone lacks 
— variety, largeness, picturesqueness of contrast and sur- 
prise. Above us is the same unchanging blue as there ; 
but here it overarches gardens fresh with verdure and 
bright with flowers, and houses gleaming white among 
the dark fir-clumps ; hidden little ravines break the end- 
less tossings of the ground ; in the distance white roads 
rush straight to gray towns hanging strangely against 
the hill-sides; a thin snow-line glitters along the ridge 
of the Maritime Alps; dark purple shadows veil the re- 
cesses of the Estrelles. 

Nor is it only this air of cheerfulness and vivacity 
which makes Cannes so pleasant a spring resort for in- 
valids; it possesses, in addition, an advantage of situa- 
tion which its more sheltered rivals necessarily want. 



36 STKAY STUDIES. 

The high mountain walls that give their complete se- 
curity from cold winds to Mentoue or San Remo are 
simply prison walls to visitors who are too weak to face 
a steep ascent on foot or even on donkey -back, for 
drives are out of the question except along one or two 
monotonous roads. But the country round Cannes is 
full of easy walks and drives, and it is as varied and 
beautiful as it is accessible. You step out of your hotel 
into the midst of wild scenery, rough hills of broken 
granite screened with firs, or paths winding through a 
wilderness of white heath. Everywhere in spring the 
ground is carpeted with a profusion of wild flowers, cis- 
tus and brown orchis, narcissus, and the scarlet anem- 
one; sometimes the forest scenery sweeps away, and 
leaves us among olive-grounds and orange -gardens ar- 
ranged in formal, picturesque rows. And from every 
little height there are the same distant views of far-off 
mountains, or the old town flooded with yellow light, or 
islands lying, gem-like, in the dark-blue sea, or the fiery 
hue of sunset over the Estrelles. 

Nor are these land-trips the only charm of Cannes. 
No one has seen the coast of Provence in its beauty 
who has not seen it from the sea. A sail to the isles of 
Lerins reveals for the first time the full glory of Cannes 
even to those who have enjoyed most keenly the l^rge 
picturesqueness of its landscapes, the delicate coloring 
of its distant hills, the splendor of its sunsets. As one 
drifts away from the shore, the circle of the Maritime 



CANNES AND ST. HONOR AT. 37 

Alps rises like the frame-work of some perfect picture, 
the broken outline of the mountains to the left contrast- 
ing with the cloud-capped heights above Turbia, snow- 
peaks peeping over the farther slopes between them, 
delicate lights and shadows falling am one: the broken 
country of the foreground, Cannes itself stretching its 
bright line of white along the shore. In the midst of 
the bay, the centre, as it were, of this exquisite land- 
scape, lie the two isles of Lerins. With the larger, that 
of St. Marguerite, romance has more to do than history, 
and the story of the "Man in the Iron Mask," who was 
so long a prisoner in its fortress, is fast losing the mys- 
tery which made it dear even to romance. The lesser 
and more distant isle, that of St. Honorat, is one of the 
great historic sites of the world. It is the starting-point 
of European monasticism, whether in its Latin, its Teu- 
tonic, or its Celtic form, for it was by Lerins that the 
monasticism of Egypt first penetrated into the West. 

The devotees whom the fame of Antony and of the 
cenobites of the Nile had drawn in crowds to the East 
returned, at the close of the fourth century, to found 
similar retreats in the isles which line the coasts of the 
Mediterranean. The sea took the place of the desert, 
but the type of monastic life which the solitaries had 
found in Egypt was faithfully preserved. The Abbot 
of Lerins was simply the chief of some thousands of 
religious devotees, scattered over the island in solitary 
cells, and linked together by the common ties of obedU 



38 STRAY STUDIES. 

ence and prayer. By a curious concurrence of events, 
the cenobitic life of Lerins, so utterly unlike the later 
monasticism of the Benedictines, was long preserved in 
a remote corner of Christendom. Patrick, the most fa- 
mous of its scholars, transmitted its type of monasticism 
to the Celtic Church which he founded in Ireland ; and 
the vast numbers, the asceticism, the loose organization 
of such abbeys as those of Bangor and Armagh preserved 
to the twelfth century the essential characteristics of 
Lerins. Nor is this all its historical importance. What 
lona is to the ecclesiastical history of Northern En- 
gland, what Fulda and Monte Casino are to the ecclesi- 
astical history of Germany and Southern Italy, that this 
Abbey of St. Honorat became to the Church of South- 
ern Gaul. For nearly two centuries, and those centu- 
ries of momentous change, when the wreck of the Ro- 
man Empire threatened civilization and Christianity 
with ruin like its own, the civilization and Christianity 
of the great district between the Loire, the Alps, and 
the Pyrenees rested mainly on the Abbey of Lerins. 
Sheltered by its insular position from the ravages of the 
barbaric invaders who poured down on the Phone and 
the Garonne, it exercised over Provence and Aqnitaine 
a supremacy such as lona, till the Synod of Whitby, 
exercised over Northumbria. All the more illustrious 
sees of Southern Gaul were tilled by prelates who had 
been reared at Lerins ; to Aries, for instance, it gave in 
succession Hilary, Caesarius, and Virgilius. The voice 
of the Church was found in that of its doctors; the fa- 



CANNES AND ST. HONORAT. 39 

mous rule of faith, " Quod ubique, quod semper, quod 
ab omnibus," is the rule of Vincent of Lerins ; its monk 
Salvian painted the agony of the dying empire in his 
book on the government of God ; the long fight of semi- 
Pelagianism against the sterner doctrines of Augustin 
was chiefly waged within its bounds. 

Little remains to illustrate this earlier and more fa- 
mous period of the monastic history of Lerins, which 
extends to the massacre of its monks by Saracen pirates 
at the opening of the eighth century. The very look 
of the island has been changed by the revolutions of 
the last hundred years. It is still a mere spit of sand, 
edged along the coast with sombre pines ; but the whole 
of the interior has been stripped of its woods by the 
agricultural improvements which are being carried on 
by the Franciscans who at present possess it, and all 
trace of solitude and retirement has disappeared. A 
well in the centre of the island and a palm-tree beside 
the church are linked to the traditional history of the 
founders of the abbey. Worked into the later build- 
ings we find marbles and sculptures which may have 
been brought from the main-land, as at Torcello, by fu- 
gitives who had escaped the barbaric storm. A bass- 
relief of Christ and the apostles, which is now inserted 
over the west gate of the church, and a column of red 
marble which stands beside it, belong probably to the 
earliest days of the settlement at Lerins. In the little 
chapels scattered over the island, fragments of early 



40 STRAY STUDIES. 

sarcophagi, inscriptions, and sculpture have been in- 
dustriously collected and preserved. But the chapels 
themselves are far more interesting than their contents. 
Of the seven which originally lined the shore, two or 
three only now remain uninjured ; in these the build- 
ing itself is either square or octagonal, pierced with a 
single rough Romanesque window, and of diminutive 
size. The walls and vaulting are alike of rough stone- 
work. The chapels served till the Revolution as seven 
stations which were visited by the pilgrims to the isl- 
and ; but we can hardly doubt that in these, as in the 
Seven Chapels at Glendalongh, we see relics of the 
earlier cenobitic establishment. 

The cloister of the abbey is certainly of a date later 
than the massacre of the monks, which took place, ac- 
cording to tradition, in the little square of wild green- 
sward which lies within it; but the roughness of its 
masonry, the plain barrel roof, and the rude manner in 
which the low, gloomy vaulting is carried round its 
angles, are of the same character as in the usual tenth- 
century buildings of Southern Gaul. With the excep- 
tion of the masonry of its side walls, there is nothing 
in the existing remains of the abbey church itself ear- 
lier than its reconstruction at the close of the eleventh 
century. The building has been so utterly wrecked 
that little architectural detail is left; but the broad 
nave, with its narrow side aisles, the absence, as in the 
Aqnitanian churches, of triforium and clear-story, and 



CANNES AND ST. HONORAT. 41 

the shortness of the choir space, give their own individ- 
ual mark to St. Honorat. Of the monastic buildings 
directly connected with the church only a few rooms 
remain, and these are destitute of any features of inter- 
est. They are at present used as an orphanage by the 
Franciscans, whom the Bishop of Frejus, by whom the 
island was purchased some fifteen years ago, has settled 
there as an agricultural colony, and whose reverence 
for the relics around them is as notable as their courte- 
sy to the strangers who visit them. If it is true that 
the island narrowly escaped being turned into a tea-gar- 
den and resort for picnics by some English speculators, 
Ave can only feel a certain glow of gratitude to the Bish- 
op of Frejus. The brown train of the eleven brothers, 
as we saw them pacing slowly beneath the great ca- 
roub-tree close to the abbey, or the row of boys blink- 
ing in the sunshine, as they repeat their lesson to the 
lay brother who acts as school-master, jar less roughly 
on the associations of Lerins than the giggle of hap- 
py lovers or the pop of British Champagne. 

There is little interest in the later story of St. Hono- 
rat, from the days of the Saracen massacre to its escape 
from conversion into a tea-garden. The appearance of 
the Moslem pirates at once robbed it of its old security, 
and the cessation of their attacks was followed by new 
dangers from the Genoese and Catalans who infested 
the coast in the fourteenth century. The isle was alter- 
nately occupied by French and Spaniards in the war 



42 STRAY STUDIES. 

between Francis and Charles V. ; it passed under the 
rule of Commendatory abbots ; and in 1789, when it was 
finally secularized, the four thousand monks of its earli- 
er history had shrunk to four. Perhaps the most curi- 
ous of all the buildings of Lerins is that which took its 
rise in the insecurity of its mediaeval existence. The 
Castle of Lerins, which lies on the shore to the south of 
the church, is at once a castle and an abbey. Like 
many of the great monasteries of the East, its first ob- 
ject was to give security to its inmates against the ma- 
rauders who surrounded them. Externally its appear- 
ance is purely military ; the great tower rises from its 
trench cut deep in the rock, a portcullis protects the 
gate, the walls are pierced with loop-holes and crowned 
with battlements. But within, the arrangements, so 
far as it is possible to trace them in the present ruined 
state of the building, seem to have been purely monas- 
tic. The interior of the tower is occupied by a double- 
arched cloister, with arcades of exquisite first- pointed 
work, through which one looks down into the little court 
below. The visitor passes from this into the ruins of 
the abbot's chapel, to which the relics were transferred 
for security from the church of St. Honorat, and which 
was surrounded by the cells, the refectory, and the do- 
mestic buildings of the monks. The erection of the 
castle is dated in the twelfth century, and from this 
time we may consider the older abbey buildings around 
the church to have been deserted and left to ruin ; but 
we can hardly grumble at a transfer which has given 



CANNES AND ST. HONORAT. 43 

us so curious a combination of military and monastic 
architecture in the castle itself. 

Something of the feudal spirit which such a residence 
would be likely to produce appears in the abbot's rela- 
tions with the little town of Cannes, which formed a 
part of his extensive lordship on the main -land. Its 
Ushers were harassed by heavy tolls on their fishery, and 
the rights of first purchase in the market and forced la- 
bor were rigorously exacted by the monastic officers. It 
is curious to compare, as one's boat floats back across 
the waters of the bay, the fortunes of these serfs and of 
their lords. 



II. 

CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE. 

Carnival in an ordinary little Italian town seems, no 
doubt, commonplace enough to those who have seen its 
glories in Rome — the crowded Corso, the rush of the 
maddened horses, the fire -fly twinklings of the Macco- 
letti. A single evening of simple fun, a few peasants 
laughing in the sunshine, a few children scrambling for 
bonbons, form an almost ridiculous contrast to the gor- 
geous outburst of revelry and color that ushers in Lent 
at the capital. But there are some people, after all, who 
still find a charm in the simple and the commonplace, 
and to whom the every -day life of Italy is infinitely 
pleasanter than the stately ceremonial of Rome. At 
any rate, the stranger who has fled from Northern win- 
ters to the shelter of the Riviera is ready to greet in the 
homeliest Carnival the incoming of spring. His first 
months of exile have probably been months of a little 
disappointment. lie is far from having found the per- 
petual sunshine which poets and guide-books led him to 
hope for. He has shivered at Christmas just as he shiv- 
ered at home, he has had his days of snow-fall and his 
weeks of rain. If he is thoroughly British, he has 



CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE. 45 

growled, and grumbled, and written to expose "the 
humbug of the sunny South" in the Times ; if he is 
patient, he has jotted down day after day in his diary, 
and found a cold sort of statistical comfort in the dis- 
covery that the sunny days, after all, outnumbered the 
gloomy ones. The worst winter of the Riviera, he is 
willing to admit, would be a very mild winter at home ; 
but still, after each concession to one's diary and com- 
mon sense, there remains a latent feeling of disappoint- 
ment and deception. 

But Carnival sweeps all this feeling away with the 
coming of the spring. From the opening of February, 
week follows week in a monotony of warm sunshine. 
Day after day there is the same cloudless cope of blue 
overhead, the same marvelous color in the sea, the same 
blaze of roses in the gardens, the same scent of violets 
in every lazy breath of air that wanders down from the 
hills. Every almond -tree is a mass of white bloom. 
The narcissus has found a rival along the terraces in 
the anemone, and already the wild tulip is preparing 
to dispute the palm of supremacy with both. It is the 
time for picnics, for excursions, for donkey - rides, for 
dreams beneath the clump of cypresses that shoot up 
black into the sky, for siestas beneath the olives. It is 
wonderful what a prodigious rush of peace and good 
temper follows on the first rush of spring. The very 
doctors of the winter resort shake hands with one an- 
other, the sermons of the chaplain lose their frost-bitten 



■±6 STRAY STUDIES. 

savor and die down into something like charity, scandal 
and tittle-tattle go to sleep in the sunshine. The stolid, 
impassive English nature blooms into a life strangely 
unlike its own. Papas forget their Times. Mammas 
forget their propriety. The stout British merchant 
finds himself astride of a donkey, and exchanging good- 
humored badinage with the laborers in the olive- ter- 
races. The Dorcas of Exeter Hall leaves her tracts at 
home, and passes without a groan the pictured Madon- 
na on every wall. Carnival comes, and completes the 
wreck of the proprieties. The girls secure their win- 
dow, and pelt their black-bearded professor in the street 
below without dread of a scolding on the "conve- 
nances." The impassive spinster, whose voice never rises 
at home above the most polite whisper, screams with 
delight at the first sugar-plum that hits her, and furtive- 
ly supplies her nieces with ammunition to carry on the 
» war. " It is such fun, isn't it, papa V shout the boys, 
as they lean breathless over the balcony, laughing and 
pelting at the crowd that laughs and pelts back again. 
And papa, who "puts down" fairs in England, and 
wonders what amusement people can find in peep-shows 
and merry-go-rounds, finds himself surprised into a 
"Very jolly, indeed !" 

It is the same welcome to the spring that gives its 
charm to the Carnival in the minds of the Italians 
themselves. To the priest, of course, Carnival is sim- 
ply a farewell to worldly junketings and a welcome to 



CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE. 47 

Lent ; but, like every other Church festival, it is fling- 
ing off its ecclesiastical disguise, and donning among 
the people themselves its old mask as a sheer bit of nat- 
ure - worship. The women still observe Lent, and their 
power as housekeepers forces its observance, to a certain 
extent, on their husbands and sons. The Italian shrugs 
his shoulders and submits in a humorous way to what is 
simply a bit of domestic discipline, revenges himself by 
a jest on the priesthood, and waits with his quiet "pa- 
zienza " till the progress of education shall have secured 
him a wife who won't grudge him his dinner. But 
Lent is no reality to him, and spring is a very real thing 
indeed. The winter is so short that the whole habit of 
his life and the very fabric of his home are framed on 
the apparent supposition that there is no such thing as 
winter at all. His notion of life is life in the open air, 
life in the sunshine. The peasant of the Cornice looks 
on with amazement at an Englishman tramping along 
in the rain. A little rain-fall or a little snow keeps ev- 
ery laborer at home with a murmur of " Cattivo Dio " 
between his teeth. A Scotchman or a Yorkshireman 
wraps his plaid around him, and looks with contempt 
on an idle race who are " afraid of a sprinkle." But 
the peasant of North Italy is no more of an idler than 
the peasant of the Lowlands. The truth is, that both 
he and his home are absolutely unprepared for bad 
weather. His clothes are thin and scanty. His diet is 
low. The wonder is how he gets through a hard day's 
work on food which an English pauper would starve 



48 STRAY STUDIES. 

upon. He Las no fire-place at home, and, if he had, he 
has no fuel. Wood is very dear, and coal there is none. 
If he gets wet through, there is no hearth to dry him- 
self or his clothes at. Cold means fever, and fever with 
low diet means death. Besides, there is little loss in 
staying at home on rainy days. In England or the 
Lowlands, the peasant farmer who couldn't "bide a 
shower" would lose half the year; but a rainy day 
along the Cornice is so rare a thing that it makes little 
difference in the year's account. 

It is much the same with the townsman, the trader, 
the professional man. When work in the shop or office 
is over, his life circles round the cafe. Society and 
home mean for him the chatty, gesticulating group of 
friends camped out round their little tables on the 
pavement under the huge awning that gives them 
shade. When winter breaks up the pleasant circle, and 
the dark, chilly evenings drive him, as we say, " home," 
he has no home to flee unto. He is not used to domes 
tic life, or to conversation with his wife or his children. 
Above all, there is no fire, no " hearth and home." Go- 
ing home, in fact, means going to bed. An Italian 
doctor or an Italian lawyer knows nothing of the cozy 
evenings of the North, of the bright fire, the brighter 
chat round it, or the quiet book till sleep comes. Some- 
body has said truly enough that if a man wanted to 
see human life at its best, he would spend his winters 
in England and his summers in Italy. We have so 



CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE. 49 

much winter that we have faced it, made a study of 
it, and beaten it. Our houses are a great nuisance in 
warm weather, but their thick walls and close-fitting 
windows and broad fire-places are admirably adapted 
for cold. Italians, on the other hand, have so little 
winter that when the cold does come, it is completely 
their master. The large, dark, cool rooms that are so 
grateful in July are simply ice-houses in December. 
The large windows are full of crevices and draughts. 
An ordinary Italian positively dreads a fire, from his 
knowledge of the perils it entails in rooms so draughty 
as Italian rooms commonly are. He infinitely prefers 
to rub his blue little hands and wait till this inscrutable 
mystery of bad weather be overpast. But it is only 
the thought of what he suffers during the winter, short 
as it is in comparison with our own, that enables us to 
understand the ecstasy of his joy at the re -appearance 
of the spring. Every body meets every body with 
greetings on the warmth and the sunshine. The moth- 
er comes down again to bask herself at every door-step, 
and the little street is once more alive with chat and 
laughter. The very beggars exchange their whine for 
a more cheerful tone of insidious persuasion. The 
women sing, as they jog down the hill -paths with 
the big baskets of olives on their heads. The old 
dispossessed friar slumbers happily by the road -side. 
The little tables come out on to the pavement, and the 
society of the place forms itself afresh into buzzing 
groups of energetic conversers. The dormouse - life 

4 



50 STRAY STUDIES. 

of winter is over, and the spring and the Carnival have 
come. 

Carnival in a little Italian town, as we have said, is 
no very grand thing ; and, as a mere question of fun, 
it is no donbt amusing only to people who are ready to 
be amused. And yet there is a quaint fascination in 
it, as a whole ; in the rows of old women with demure 
little children in their laps ranged on the stone seats 
along the bridge ; the girls on the pavement ; the gro- 
tesque figures dancing along the road; the harlequins; 
the mimic Capuchins ; the dominoes with big noses ; 
the carriages rolling along amidst a fire of sugar-plums; 
the boys darting in and out, and smothering one with 
their handfuls of flour; the sham cook, w T ith his pots 
and pans wreathed with vine-branches ; the sham cava- 
lier, in theatrical cloak and trunk hose, who dashes 
about on a pony ; the solemn group tossing a doll to a 
church -like chant in a blanket; the chaff and violet 
bunches flung from the windows ; the fun, and life, and 
buzz, and color of it all. It is something very differ- 
ent, one feels, from the common country fair of home. 
In the first place, it is eminently picturesque. As one 
looks down from the balcony through a storm of sugar- 
plums, the eye revels in a perfect feast of color. Even 
the russet-brown of every old woman's dress glows in 
the sunshine into a strange beauty. Every little touch 
of red or blue in the girls' head-dresses shines out in 
the intense light. As the oddly attired maskers dart in 



CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE. 51 

and out or whirl past in the dance, the little street seems 
like a gay ribbon of shifting hues winding between its 
gray old houses with touches of fresh tints at every 
window and balcony. The crimson caps of the peas- 
ants stand out in bold relief against the dark green of 
the lemon -garden behind them. Overhead the wind 
is just stirring in the big pendent leaves of the two 
palm-trees in the centre of the street; and the eye, once 
caught by them, ranges on to the white mass of the 
town as it stands glowing on its hill-side, and thence to 
the brown hill-tops, and the intense blue of the sky. 

The whole setting of the scene is un-English, and the 
scene itself is as un-English as its setting. The fun, the 
enjoyment, is universal. There is nothing of the com- 
plicated apparatus which an English fair requires, none 
of the contrivances to make people laugh — the clowns, 
the cheap-jacks, the movable theatres, the vans with fat 
women and two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the 
peep-shows, the peripatetic photographers, the weigh- 
ing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds. And so 
there are none of the groups of vacant faces, the joyless 
chaw-bacons lounging gloomily from stall to stall, the 
settled inanity and dreariness of the crowd that drifts 
through an English fair. An English peasant goes to 
be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully hard 
work to amuse him. The peasant of Italy goes to Car- 
nival to amuse himself, and to amuse every body else. 
He is full of joyousness and fun, and he wishes every 



52 STRAY STUDIES. 

body to be as funny and as joyous as himself. He has 
no notion of doing his merriment by deputy. He claps 
his mask on his face, or takes his bag of flour in his 
hand, and is himself the fun of the fair. His neighbor 
does precisely the same. The two farmers who were 
yesterday chaffering over the price of maize meet each, 
other in Carnival as Punch and Harlequin. Every boy 
has his false nose or his squeaking whistle. The quiet 
little maiden whom you saw yesterday washing her 
clothes in the torrent comes tripping up the street with 
a mask on her face. The very mothers, with their lit- 
tle ones in their laps, throw in their contribution of 
smart speeches and merry taunts to the fun of the af- 
fair. It is wonderful how simple the elements of their 
amusement are, and how perfectly they are amused. A 
little masquerading, a little dancing, a little pelting 
with flour and sugar-plums, and every body is as happy 
as possible. 

And it is a happiness that is free from any coarse in- 
termixture. The badinage is childish enough, but it 
has none of the foul slang in which an English crowd 
delights to express its notions of humor. The girls ban- 
dy " chaff " with their disguised lovers, but the " chaff " 
is what their mothers might hear. There is none of the 
brutal horse-play of home. Harlequin goes by with his 
little bladder suspended from a string, but the dexter- 
ous little touch is a touch and no more. The tiny sug- 
ar-plums rain like hail on one's face, but there is the 



CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE. 53 

fan of catching them and seeing the children hunt after 
them in the dust. The flour -pelting is the hardest to 
bear, but the annoyance is redeemed by the burst of 
laughter from the culprit and the by-standers. It is a 
rare thing to see any body lose his temper. It is a yet 
rarer thing to see any body drunk. The sulky alterca- 
tions, the tipsy squabbles, of Northern amusements are 
unknown. The characteristic " prudence " of the Ital- 
ian is never better displayed than in his merriment. He 
knows how far to carry his badinage. He knows when 
to have done with his fun. The tedious length of an 
English merry-making would be unintelligible to him ; 
he doesn't care to spoil the day's enjoyment by making 
a night of it. A few hours of laughter satisfy him, and 
when evening falls and the sunshine goes, he goes with 
the sunshine. 

It is in the Carnival that one sees most conspicuously 
displayed that habit of social equality which is one of 
the special features of Italian life. Nothing is more 
unlike the social jealousy of the Frenchman, or the sur- 
ly incivility with which a Lancashire operative thinks 
proper to show the world that he is as good a man as 
his master. In either case one feels the taint of a mere 
spirit of envious leveling, and a latent confession that 
the leveling process has still, in reality, to be accom- 
plished. But the ordinary Italian has nothing of the 
leveler about him. The little town is proud of its mar- 
chese, and of the great palazzo that has entertained a 



54 STKAY STUDIES. 

king. It is a matter of public concern when the count 
gambles away his patrimony. An Italian noble is no 
object of jealousy to his fellow-citizens ; but, then, no one 
gives himself less of the airs of a privileged or exclusive 
cast. Cavour was a popular man because, noble as he 
was, he would smoke a cigar or stop for a chat with any 
body. The Carnival brings out this characteristic of 
Italian manners amusingly enough. The mask, the dis- 
guise, levels all distinctions. The count's whiskers are 
white with the flour just flung at him by the town-crier. 
The young nephews of the baron are the two harlequins 
who are exchanging badinage with the group of coun- 
try girls at the corner. A general pelting of sugar- 
plums salutes the appearance of the marchese's four-in- 
hand, with the marchese himself in an odd mufti on the 
box. 

Social equality is possible, because among rich and 
poor alike there is the same social ease. Barber or don- 
key-driver chats to you with a perfect frankness, and un- 
consciousness of any need of reserve. In both rich and 
poor, too, there are the same social taste and refinement. 
The coarse dress of the peasant girl is worn with as na- 
tive a dignity as the robe of a queen. An unconscious 
elegance breathes through the very disguises of the Car- 
nival, grotesque as many of them are. The young fel- 
low who has wreathed himself with flowers and vine- 
leaves shows a knowledge of color and effect which an 
artist might envy him. But there is not one among the 



CARNIVAL ON THE CORNICE. 55 

roughest of the peasants or of the towns-folk who has 
not that indescribable thing we call manner, or who 
would betray our insular awkwardness when we speak 
to a lord. And, besides this social equality, there is a 
family equality too. In England old people enjoy fun, 
but it is held to be indecorous in them to afford amuse- 
ment to .others. A Palmerston may be a jester at 
eighty, but the jest must never go beyond words. But 
in an Italian Carnival the old claim just as much a part 
in the fun as the young. Grandfathers and grandmoth- 
ers think it the most natural thing in the world to turn 
out in odd costumes, to give a good laugh to the grand- 
children. Papa pops on the most comical mask he can 
find, and walks down the street arm-in-arm with his 
boy. In no country, perhaps, is the filial regard strong- 
er than in Italy ; nowhere do mothers claim authority 
so long over their sons. But this seems to be compati- 
ble with a domestic liberty and ease which would be 
impossible in the graver nations of the North. If once 
we laughed at our mother's absurdities, a mother's in- 
fluence would be gone. But an Italian will laugh and 
go on reverencing and obeying in a w T ay we should nev- 
er dream of. Altogether, it is wonderful how many 
sides of social life and national character find their il- 
lustration in a country Carnival. 



III. 

TWO PIRATE TOWNS OF THE RIVIERA. 

The view of Monaco, as one looks down on it from 
the mountain road which leads to Turbia, is, unques- 
tionably, the most picturesque among all the views of 
the Riviera. The whole coast-line lies before us for a 
last look as far as the hills above San Eemo ; headland 
after headland running out into blue water ; white little 
towns nestling in the depth of sunny bays, or clinging 
to the brown hill-side ; villas peeping white from the 
dark olive masses ; sails gleaming white against the pur- 
ple sea. The brilliancy of light, the purity and inten- 
sity of color, the clear freshness of the mountain air, 
tempered as it is by the warm sun-glow, make the long 
rise from Mentone hard to forget. Mentone itself steals 
out again and again from under its huge red cliffs, to 
look up at us. We pass by Eoccabrnna, half rock, half 
village, hanging high on the hill -side; we leave the 
orange -groves beneath us studded with golden fruit. 
Even the silvery, wayward olives fail us, even the pines 
grow thin and stunted. At last the mountain rises 
bare above us, with only a red rock jutting here and 
there from its ashen-colored front. We reach the top, 



TWO PIRATE TOWNS. 57 

and right in our road rises a vast fragment of Roman 
masonry, the tower of Turbia, while, thousands of feet be- 
neath, Monaco glows "like a gem" in its setting of dark- 
blue sea. We are on the track of "The Daisy," and the 
verse of Tennyson's gay little poem comes back to us : 

"What Roman strength Turbia show'd 
In ruin, by the mountain road ; 

How like a gem, beneath, the city 
Of little Monaco, basking, glow'd." 

Monaco stands on a promontory of rock which falls 
in bold cliffs into the sea. As one climbs to it from the 
bay, one sees the citadel with its huge bastions frown- 
ing on the white buildings of the palace, the long line 
of gray, ivy-crested walls topping the cliffs ; and above 
them the mass of the little town, broken by a single 
campanile and a few cypresses. Its situation at once 
marks the character of the place. It is the one town 
of the Riviera which, instead of lying screened in the 
hollow of some bay, as though eager to escape from 
pirate or Saracen, juts boldly out into the sea, as if on 
the lookout for prey. Its grim walls, the guns still 
mounted, and shot piled on its battlements, mark the 
pirate town of the past. At its feet, in trim square of 
hotel and gambling-house, with a smart Parisian look 
about it, as if the whole had been just caught up out 
of the boulevards and dropped on this Italian coast, 
lies the new Monaco, the pirate town of the present. 

Even the least among Italian cities yields so much 



58 STRAY STUDIES. 

of interest in its past that we turn with disappointment 
from the history of Monaco. The place has always 
been a mere pirate haunt, without a break of liberty or 
civic life ; and yet there is a certain fascination in the 
perfect uniformity of its existence. The town from 
which Csesar sailed to Genoa and Rome vanished be- 
fore the ravages of the Saracens, and the spot remained 
desert till it passed, by imperial cession, to Genoa, and 
the Genoese Commune erected a fort which became a 
refuge alternately for its Guelf or Ghibelline exiles, its 
Spinolas or its* Grimaldis. A church of fine twelfth- 
century work is the only monument which remains of 
this earlier time. At the opening of the fourteenth cent- 
ury Monaco passed finally to the Grimaldis, and became 
in their hands a haunt of buccaneers. Only one of their 
line rises into historic fame, and he is singularly con- 
nected with a great event in English history. Charles 
Grimaldi was one of the foremost leaders in the Italian 
wars of his day. He passed as a mercenary into the 
service of France, in her combat with Edward III., and 
his seventy-two galleys set sail from Monaco with the 
fifteen thousand Genoese bowmen who appear so unex- 
pectedly in the forefront of the Battle of Crecy. The 
massacre of these forces drove him home again, to en- 
gage in attacks on the Catalans and Venetians, and 
struggles with Genoa, till the wealth which his piracy 
had accumulated enabled him to add Mentone and 
Roccabruna to his petty dominions. It is needless to 
trace the history of his house any farther; corsairs, 



TWO PIRATE TOWNS. 59 

soldiers of fortune, trimming adroitly in the struggles 
of the sixteenth century between France and Spain, 
sinking finally into mere vassals of Louis XIV. and 
hangers-on at the French court, the family history of 
the Grimaldis is one of treason and blood — brother 
murdering brother, nephew murdering uncle, assassina- 
tion by subjects avenging the honor of daughters out- 
raged by their master's lust. 

Of the town itself, as we have said, there is no his- 
tory at all; it consists, indeed, only of a few petty 
streets streaming down the hill from the palace square. 
The palace, though spoiled by a gaudy modern restora- 
tion, is externally a fine specimen of Italian Kenaissance 
work, its court painted all over with arabesques of a 
rough Caravaggio order, while the state -rooms within 
have a thoroughly French air, as if to embody the dou- 
ble character of their occupants, at once Lords of Mona- 
co and Dues de Valentinois. The palace is encircled 
with a charming little garden, a bit of color and green- 
ery squeezed in, as it were, between cliff and fortress, 
from which one looks down over precipices of red rock, 
with the prickly-pear clinging to their clefts and ledges, 
or across a rift of sea to the huge bare front of the 
Testa del Cane, with gigantic euphorbias, cactus, and 
orange-gardens fringing its base. A bribe administered 
to Talleyrand is said to have saved the political exist- 
ence of Monaco at the Congress of Vienna ; but it is far 
more wonderful that, after all the annexations of late 



60 STRAY STUDIES. 

years, it should still remain an independent, though the 
smallest, principality in the world. But even the Gri- 
maldis have not managed wholly to escape from the 
general luck of their fellow-rulers ; Mentone and Rocca- 
bruna were ceded to France some few years back for a 
sum of four million francs ; and the present Lord of Mo- 
naco is the ruler of but a few streets and some two 
thousand subjects. His army reminds one of the fa- 
mous war establishment of the older German prince- 
lings. One year, indeed, to the amazement of behold- 
ers, it rose to the gigantic force of four - and - twenty 
men ; but then, as we were gravely told by an official, 
"it had been doubled in consequence of the war." 
Idler and absentee as he is, the prince is faithful to the 
traditions of his house ; the merchant, indeed, sails with- 
out dread beneath the once dreaded rocks of the pirate 
haunt ; but a new pirate town has risen on the shores of 
its bay. It is the pillage of a host of gamblers that 
maintains the heroic army of Monaco, that cleanses its 
streets, and fills the exchequer of its lord. 

There is something exquisitely piquant in the contrast 
between the gloomy sternness of the older robberhold 
and the gayety and attractiveness of the new. Nothing 
can be prettier than the gardens, rich in fountains and 
statues and tropical plants, which surround the neat Pa- 
risian square of buildings. The hotel is splendidly dec- 
orated, and its cuisine claims to be the best in Europe. 
There is a pleasant cafe. The doors of the Casino itself 



TWO PIRATE TOWNS. 61 

stand hospitably open, and strangers may wander with- 
out a question from hall to reading-room, or listen in 
the concert -room to an excellent band which plays 
twice a day. The salon itself, the terrible " Hell " which 
one has pictured with all sorts of Dantesque accompani- 
ments, is a pleasant room, gayly painted, with cozies all 
round it, and a huge mass of gorgeous flowers in the 
centre. Nothing can be more unlike one's preconceived 
ideas than the gambling itself, or the aspect of the gam- 
blers around the tables. Of the wild excitement, the 
frenzy of gain, the outbursts of despair which one has 
come prepared to witness, there is not a sign. The 
games strike the by-stander as singularly dull and unin- 
teresting. One wearies of the perpetual deal and turn- 
up of the cards at rouge-et-noir, of the rattle of the ball 
as it dances into its pigeon-hole at roulette, of the mo- 
notonous chant of " Make your game, gentlemen," or, 
"The game is made." The croupiers rake in their 
gains or poke out the winnings with the passive regular- 
ity of machines ; the gamblers sit round the table with 
the vacant solemnity of undertakers. The general air 
of the company is that of a number of well-to-do people 
bored out of their lives, and varying their boredom with 
quiet nods to the croupier and assiduous prickings of 
little cards. 

The boredom is apparently greatest at rouge-et-noir, 
where the circle is more aristocratic, and thousands can 
be lost and won in a night. Every body looks tired, 



62 STRAY STUDIES. 

absent, inattentive; nobody takes much notice of his 
neighbor or of the spectators looking on ; nobody cares 
to speak ; a finger suffices to direct the croupier to push 
the stake on to the desired spot, a nod or a look to in- 
dicate the winner. The game goes on in a dull uni- 
formity ; nobody varies his stake ; a few napoleons are 
added to or subtracted from the heaps before each as 
the minutes go on ; sometimes a little sum is done on 
a paper beside the player; but there is the same im- 
passive countenance, the same bored expression every- 
where. Now and then one player gets quietly up and 
another sits quietly 'down. But there is nothing start- 
ling or dramatic, no frenzies of hope or exclamations of 
despair, nothing of the gambler of fiction with "his 
hands clasped to his burning forehead," and the like. 
To any one who is not fascinated by the mere look of 
rolls of napoleons pushed from one color to another, or 
of gold raked about in little heaps, there is something 
very difficult to understand in the spell which a gam- 
ing-table exercises. Roulette is a little more amusing, 
as it is more intelligible to the looker-on. The stakes 
are smaller, the company changes oftener, and is social- 
ly more varied. There is not such a dead, heavy ear- 
nestness about these riskers of five-franc pieces as about 
the more desperate gamblers of ronge-et-noir ; the out- 
side fringe of lookers-on bend over with their stakes to 
back " a run of luck," and there is a certain quiet buzz 
of interest when the game seems going against the 
bank. There is always some one going and coming, 



TWO PIRATE TOWNS. 63 

overdressed girls lean over and drop their stake and dis- 
appear, young clerks bring their quarter's salary, the 
casual visitor "doesn't mind risking a few francs" at 
roulette. 

But even the excitement of roulette is of the gravest 
and dullest order. The only player who seems to throw 
any kind of vivacity into his gambling is a gaudy little 
Jew with heavy watch-chain, who vibrates between one 
table and another, sees nothing of the game save the 
dropping his stake at roulette and then rushing off to 
drop another stake at rouge-et-noir, and finds time in 
his marches to spare a merry little word to a friend or 
two. But he is the only person who seems to know any 
body. Men who sit by one another year after year 
never exchange a word. There is not even the air of 
reckless adventure to excite one. The player who dash- 
es down his all on any part of the table and trusts to 
fortune is a mere creature of fiction ; the gambler of 
fact is a calculator, a man of business, with a contempt 
for speculation, and a firm belief in long-studied com- 
bination. Each has his little card, and ticks off the suc- 
cession of numbers with the accuracy of a ledger. It is 
in the careful study of these statistics that each believes 
lie discovers the secret of the game, the arrangement 
which, however it may be defeated for a time by inscru- 
table interference of ill-luck, must in the end, if there 
is any truth in statistics, be successful. One looks in 
vain for the "reckless gambler" one has read about 



64 STRAY STUDIES. 

and talked about ; for " reckless " is the very last word 
by which one would describe the ring of business-like 
people who come day after day with the hope of mak- 
ing money by an ingenious dodge. 

Their talk, if one listens to it over the dinner-table, 
turns altogether on this business-like aspect of the ques- 
tion. Nobody takes the least interest in its romantic 
or poetic side, in the wonderful runs of luck or the ter- 
rible stories of ruin and despair which form the stock 
in trade of the novelist. The talk might be that of a 
conference of commercial travelers. Every body has 
his infallible nostrum for breaking the bank ; but every 
body looks upon the prospect of such a fortune in a 
purely commercial light. The general opinion of the 
wiser sort goes against heavy stakes, and " wild play " 
is only talked about with contempt. The qualities held 
in honor, so far as we can gather from the conversation, 
are "judgment," which means a careful study of the 
little cards and a certain knowledge of mathematics, 
and "constancy" — the playing, not from caprice, but 
on a definite plan and principle. Nobody has the least 
belief in " luck." A winner is congratulated on his 
"science." The loser explains the causes of his loss. 
A portly person who announces himself as one of a 
company of gamblers who have invested an enormous 
capital on a theory of winning by means of low stakes 
and a certain combination, excites universal interest. 
Most of the talkers describe themselves frankly as men 



TWO PIRATE TOWNS. 65 

of business. No doubt, at Monaco, as elsewhere, there 
is the usual aristocratic fringe — the Russian prince who 
flings away an estate at a sitting, the half-blind count- 
ess from the Faubourg St. Germain, the Polish dancer 
with a score of titles, the English " milord." But the 
bulk of the players have the look and air of people who 
have made their money in trade. It is well to look on 
at such a scene, if only to strip off the romance which 
has been so profusely showered over it. As a matter 
of fact, nothing is more prosaic, nothing meaner in tone, 
nothing more utterly devoid of interest, than a gam- 
bling-table; but, as a question of profit, the establish- 
ment of M. Blanc throws into the shade the older pira- 
cy of Monaco. The Venetian galleons, the carracks of 
Genoa, the galleys of Marseilles, brought infinitely less 
gold to its harbor than these two little groups of the 
fools of half a continent. 

5 



IV. 

THE WINTER RETREAT. 

It is odd, when one is safety anchored in a winter 
refuge, to look back at the terrors and reluctance with 
which one first faced the sentence of exile. Even if 
sunshine were the only gain of a winter flitting, it 
would still be hard to estimate the gain. The cold 
winds, the icy showers, the fogs we leave behind us, 
give, perhaps, a zest not wholly its own to Italian sun- 
shine. But the abrupt plunge into a land of warmth 
and color sends a strange shock of pleasure through 
every nerve. The flinging -off of w r raps and furs, the 
discarding of great-coats, is like the beginning of a new 
life. It is not till we pass in this sharp, abrupt fashion 
from the November of one side the Alps to the Novem- 
ber of the other, that we get some notion of the way 
in which the actual range and freedom of life are cramp- 
ed by the " chill north-easters " in which Mr. Kingsley 
reveled. The unchanged vegetation, the background 
of dark olive-woods, the masses of ilex, the golden 
globes of the orange hanging over the garden wall, 
are all so many distinct gains to an eye which has as- 
sociated winter with leafless boughs and a bare land- 



THE WINTER RETREAT. 67 

scape. One has almost a boyish delight in plucking 
roses at Christmas or hunting for violets along the 
hedges on New - year's - day. There are chill days, of 
course, and chiller nights ; but cold is a relative term, 
and loses its English meaning in spots where snow falls 
once or twice in a year and vanishes before midday. 
The mere break of habit is delightful ; it is like a 
laughing defiance of established facts, to lounge by the 
sea- shore in the hot sun-glare of a January morning. 
And with this new sense of liberty comes, little by lit- 
tle, a freedom from the overpowering dread of chills, 
and colds, and coughs, which only invalids can appreci- 
ate. It is an indescribable relief not to look for a cold 
round every corner. The "lounging" which becomes 
one's life along the Riviera or the Bay of Naples is only 
another name for the ease and absence of anxiety which 
the mere presence of constant sunshine gives to life. 

Few people, in fact, actually " lounge " less than the 
English exiles who bask in the sun of Italy. Their real 
danger lies in the perpetual temptation to overexertion 
which arises from the sense of renewed health. Every 
village on its hill-top, every white shrine glistening high 
up among the olives, seems to woo one up the stony 
paths, and the long, hot climb to the summit. But the 
relief from home itself, the break - away from all the 
routine of one's life, is hardly less than the relief from 
great-coats. It is not till our life is thoroughly disor- 
ganized, till the grave mother of a family finds herself 



68 STRAY STUDIES. 

perched on a donkey, or the habitue of Pall-Mail sees 
himself sauntering along through the olive-groves, that 
one realizes the iron bounds within which our English 
existence moves. Every holiday, of course, brings this 
home to one, more or less ; but the long holiday of a 
whole winter brings it home most of all. England and 
English ways recede, and become unreal. Old prepos- 
sessions and prejudices lose half their force when sea 
and mountains part us from their native soil. It is hard 
to keep up our vivid interest in the politics of Little 
Pedlington, or to maintain our old excitement over the 
matrimonial fortunes of Miss Hominy. It becomes pos- 
sible to breakfast without the last telegram and to go to 
bed without the news of a fresh butchery. One's real 
interest lies in the sunshine — in the pleasure of hav- 
ing sunshine to-day, in the hope of having sunshine to- 
morrow. 

But really to enjoy the winter retreat, one must keep 
as much as possible out of the winter retreat itself. 
Few places are more depressing in their social aspects 
than these picturesque Little Britains. The winter re- 
sort is a colony of squires with the rheumatism, elderly 
maidens with delicate throats, worn-out legislators, a 
German princess or two with a due train of portly and 
short-sighted chamberlains, girls with a hectic flush of 
consumption, bronchitic parsons, barristers hurried off 
circuit by the warning cough. The life of these pa- 
tients is little more than the life of a machine. As the 



THE WINTER RETREAT. 69 

London physician says, when he bids them " good-bye," 
"The nearer you can approach to the condition of a 
vegetable, the better for your chances of recovery." All 
the delicious uncertainties and irregularities that make 
up the freedom of existence disappear. The day is 
broken up into a number of little times and seasons. 
Dinner comes at midday, and is as exact to its moment 
as the early breakfast or the "heavy tea." And be- 
tween each meal there are medicines to be taken, in- 
halations to be gone through, the due hour of rest to be 
allotted to digestion, the other due hour to exercise. 

The air of the sick-room lingers everywhere about 
the place. One catches, as it were, the far-off hush of 
the Campo Santo. Life is reduced to its lowest expres- 
sion. People exist rather than live. Every one remem- 
bers that every one else is an invalid. Yoices are soft, 
conversation is subdued, visits are short. There is a lan- 
guid, sickly sweetness in the very courtesy of society. 
Gayety is simply regarded as a danger. Every hill is a 
temptation to too long and fatiguing a climb. No sun- 
shine makes " the patient " forget his wraps. No cool- 
ness of delicious shade moves him to repose. His whole 
energy and watchfulness are directed to the avoidance 
of a chill. Life becomes simply barometrical. An east 
wind is the subject of public lamentation. The vast 
mountain range to the north is admired less for its wild 
grandeur than for the shelter it affords against the ter- 
rible mistral. Excitement is a word of dread. Dis- 



70 STRAY STUDIES. 

tance itself takes something of the sharpness and vivid- 
ness off from the old cares and interests of home. The 
very letters that reach the winter resort are doctored, 
and " incidents which might excite " are excluded by 
the care of correspondents. Mamma only hears of 
Johnny's measles when Johnny is running about again. 
The young scape-grace at Oxford is far too considerate 
to trouble his father, against the doctors orders, with 
the mention of his failure in the schools. News comes, 
with all color strained and filtered out of it, through the 
columns of Galignani. The neologian heresy, the de- 
bate in Convocation which would have stirred the heart 
of the parson at home, fall flat in the shape of a brown 
and a^ed Times. There are no " evenings out." The 
first sign of eve is the signal for dispersion homeward, 
and it is only from the safe shelter of his own room 
that the winter patient ventures to gaze on the perilous 
glories of the sunset. The evenings are, in fact, a daw- 
dle indoors, as the day has been a dawdle out ; a little 
music, a little reading of the quiet order, a little chat, a 
little letter-writing, and an early to bed. 

It is this calm monotony of day after day at which 
the world of the winter resort deliberately aims, a life 
like that of the deities of Epicurus, untouched by the 
cares or interests of the world without. The very gay- 
ety is of the same subdued and quiet order — drives, 
donkey-rides, picnics of the small and early type. An 
air of slow respectability pervades the place : the bulk 



THE WINTER RETREAT. 71 

of the colonists are people well to do, who can afford 
the expense of a winter away from home and of a villa 
at one hundred and fifty pounds the season. The bank- 
rupt element of Boulogne, the half-pay element of Di- 
nan or Avranches, are as rare on the Riviera as the loun- 
gers who rejoice in the many-changing toilets of Arca- 
chon or Biarritz. The quiet humdrum tone of the par- 
son best harmonizes with that of the winter resort, and 
parsons of all sorts abound there. 

But the chaplain is not here, as in other Little Brit- 
ains, the centre of social life ; he is superseded by the 
doctor. The winter resort, in fact, owes its origin to the 
doctor. The little village or the country town looks 
with awe upon the man who has discovered for it a fut- 
ure of prosperity, at whose call hosts of rich strangers 
come flocking from the ends of the earth, at whose bid- 
ding villas rise white among the olives, and parades 
stretch along the shore. " I found it a fishing hamlet," 
the doctor may say, with Augustus, " and I leave it a 
city." It is amusing to see the awful submission which 
the city builder expects in return. The most refractory 
of patients trembles at the threat of his case being aban- 
doned. The doctor has his theories about situation. 
You are lymphatic, and are ordered down to the very 
edge of the sea; you are excitable, and must hurry 
from your comfortable lodgings to the highest nook 
among the hills. He has his theories about diet, and 
you sink obediently to milk and water. His one object 



72 STRAY STUDIES. 

of hostility and contempt is your London physician. 
He tears up his rival's prescriptions with contempt ; he 
reverses the treatment. He sighs as you bid him fare- 
well to return to advice which is so likely to prove fatal. 
The London physician, it is true, hints that though the 
oracle of the winter resort is a clever man, he is also a 
quack. But a quack soars into a greatness beyond criti- 
cism when he creates cities and rules hundreds of pa- 
tients with his nod. 



SAN REMO. 

San Remo, though youngest in date, bids fair to be- 
come the most popular of all the health resorts of the 
Riviera. At no other point along the coast is the cli- 
mate so mild and equable. The rural quiet and repose 
of the place form a refreshing contrast with the Brigh- 
ton-like gayety of Nizza or Cannes. Even Mentone 
looks down with an air of fashionable superiority on a 
rival almost destitute of promenades, and whose munic- 
ipality sighs in vain for a theatre. To the charms of 
quiet and sunshine the place adds that of a peculiar 
beauty. The Apennines rise like a screen behind the 
amphitheatre of soft hills that inclose it — hills soft with 
olive woods, and dipping down into gardens of lemon 
and orange, and vineyards dotted with palms. An iso- 
lated spur juts out from the centre of the semicircle, 
and from summit to base of it tumbles the oddest of 
Italian towns, a strange mass of arches and churches 
and steep lanes rushing down like a stone cataract to 
the sea. On either side of the town lie deep ravines, 
with lemon gardens along their bottoms, and olives 
thick along their sides. The olive is the characteristic 
tree of San Remo. As late as the sixteenth century the 



7-i STRAY STUDIES. 

place was renowned for its palms. A palm-tree stands 
on the civic escutcheon, and the privilege of supplying 
the papal chapel with palm branches in the week before 
Easter is still possessed by a family of San Remese. 
But the palm has wandered off to ■Bordighera, and the 
high price of oil during the early part of this century 
has given unquestioned supremacy to the olive. The 
loss is, after all, a very little one ; for the palm, pictur- 
esque as is its natural effect, assumes any but pictur- 
esque forms when grown for commercial purposes, while 
the thick masses of the olive woods form a soft and al- 
most luxurious background to every view of San Remo. 

What strikes one most about the place in an artistic 
sense is its singular completeness. It lies perfectly shut 
in by the circle of mountains, the tw T o headlands in 
which they jut into the sea, and the blue curve of the 
bay. It is only by climbing to the summit of the Capo 
JSero or the Capo Verde that one sees the broken out- 
line of the coast toward Genoa, or the dim forms of 
the Estrelles beyond Cannes. Nowhere does the outer 
world seem more strangely far off and unreal. But be- 
tween headland and headland it is hardly possible to 
find a point from which the scene does not group itself 
into an exquisite picture, with the white gleaming mass 
of San Remo for a centre. Small, too, as the space is, 
it is varied and broken by the natural configuration of 
the ground ; everywhere the hills fall steeply to the very 
edge of the sea, and valleys and ravines go sharply up 



SAN EEMO. 75 

among the olive woods. Each of these has its own pe- 
culiar beauty. In the valley of the Romolo, for in- 
stance, to the west of the town, the gray mass of San 
Remo perched on a cliff-like steep, the rocky bed of the 
torrent below, the light and almost fantastic arch that 
spans it, the hills in the background, with the farther 
snow-range just peeping over them, leave memories that 
are hard to forget. It is easy, too, for a good walker to 
reach sterner scenes than those immediately around. A 
walk of two hours brings one among the pines of San 
Romolo; an hour's drive plunges one into the almost 
Alpine scenery of Ceriana. But for the ordinary fre- 
quenters of a winter resort, the chief attractions of the 
place will naturally lie in the warmth and shelter of 
San Remo itself. Protected as it is on every side but 
that of the sea, it is free from the dreaded mistral of 
Cannes and from the sharp frost winds that sweep down 
the torrent-bed of Nizza. In the earlier part of the first 
winter I spent there, the snow, which lay thick in the 
streets of Genoa and beneath even the palms of Bor- 
dighera, only whitened the distant hill -tops at San 
Remo. Christmas brought at last a real snow-fall, but 
every trace of it vanished before the sun-glare of mid- 
day. From sunset to sunrise, indeed, the air is some- 
times bitterly cold, but the days themselves are often 
pure summer days. 

What gives a special charm to San Remo, as to the 
other health stations along the Cornice, is the fact that 



76 STRAY STUDIES. 

winter and spring are here the season of flowers. Roses 
nod at one over the garden-walls, violets peep shyly out 
along the terraces, a run uphill brings one across a bed 
of narcissus. It is odd to open one's window on a Jan- 
uary morning and count four-and-twenty different kinds 
of plants in bloom in the garden below. But even were 
flowers absent, the character of the vegetation excludes 
from Northern eyes the sense of winter. The bare 
branches of the fig-tree alone remind one that " summer 
is over and gone." Every homestead up the torrent- 
valleys is embosomed in the lustrous foliage of its lem- 
on gardens. Every rivulet is choked with maiden-hair 
and delicate ferns. The golden globes of the orange 
are the ornament of every garden. The dark -green 
masses of the olive, ruffled by strong winds into sheets 
of frosted silver, are the background of the whole. And 
right in front, from headland to headland, lie the bright 
waters of the Mediterranean, rising and sinking with a 
summer's swell, and glancing with a thousand colors 
even in the gloomiest weather. 

The story of San Remo begins with Saracenic in- 
roads from Corsica and Sardinia in the ninth century, 
to which Nizza, Oneglia, and Genoa owed their walls. 
But before this time the wild Ligurian coast had afford- 
ed hermitages to the earlier bishops of Genoa : to Siro, 
who became its apostle ; to Romolo, who was destined 
to give his name to the territory of the town. San Ro- 
molo is, indeed, its invariable designation till the fif- 



SAN EEMO. 77 

teenth century; and it lias been conjectured that its 
present name is owing to no fanciful punning on Rom- 
ulus and Remus, but to a popular contraction of its full 
ecclesiastical title, " Sancti Romuli in Ere mo." It was 
in this "waste," left without inhabitants by the Sara- 
cenic inroads, that Theodulf, Bishop of Genoa, settled a 
little agricultural colony round the Carolingian fort and 
lands which, though within the feudal jurisdiction of 
the Counts of Yentimiglia, were the property of his see. 
Two centuries passed quietly over the little town, ere 
the sudden rise of the Consulate here, as at Genoa and 
Milan, gave it municipal liberty. The civil authority 
of the bishops passed to the communal Parliament, the 
free assembly of the citizens in the Church of San Ste- 
fano. All civil administration, even the right of peace 
and war, or of alliance, was exercised with perfect free- 
dom from episcopal intervention. The rights of the 
bishop, in fact, were reduced to the nomination of the 
judicial magistrates of the town and the reception of 
certain fees — rights which were subsequently sold to the 
Dorias, and transferred by the Dorias to the republic of 
Genoa. 

This great communal revolution, itself a result of the 
wave of feeling produced by the Crusades, left its char- 
acteristic mark in the armorial bearings of the town, 
the Crusaders' Palm upon its shield. While its neigh- 
bors, Yentimiglia and Albenga, sunk into haunts of a 
feudal noblesse, San Remo became a town of busy mer- 



78 STRAY STUDIES. 

chants, linked by treaties of commerce with the trading 
cities of the French and Italian coasts. The erection 
of San Siro marked the wealth and devotion of its citi- 
zens. Ruined as it is, like all the churches of the Ri- 
viera, by the ochre and stucco of a tasteless restoration, 
San Siro still retains much of the characteristic twelfth- 
century work of its first foundation. The alliance of 
the city with Genoa was that of a perfectly free state. 
The term's of the treaty which was concluded between 
the two republics in 1361 in the Genoese basilica of 
San Lorenzo are curious, as illustrating the federal re- 
lations of Italian states. It was in effect little more 
than a judicial and military convention. Internal legis- 
lation, taxation, rights of independent warfare, peace, 
and alliance were left wholly in the power of the free 
commune. San Remo was bound to contribute ships 
and men for service in Genoese warfare, but, in return, 
its citizens shared the valuable privileges of those of 
Genoa in all parts of the world. Genoa, as purchaser 
of the feudal rights of its lords, nominated the Podesta 
and other judicial officers ; but these officers were bound 
to administer the laws passed or adopted by the com- 
mune. The Red Cross of Genoa was placed above the 
Palm-tree of San Remo on the shield of the republic ; 
and on these terms the federal relations of the two 
states continued without quarrel or change for nearly 
four hundred years. 

The town continued to prosper till the alliance of 



SAN EEMO. 79 

Francis I. with the Turks brought the scourge of the 
Moslem again on the Riviera. The "Saracen towers" 
with which the coast is studded tell to this day the tale 
of the raids of Barbarossa and Dragut. The blow fell 
heavily on San Remo. The ruined quarter beneath its 
wall still witnesses to the heathen fury. San Siro, which 
lay without the walls, w T as more than once desecrated 
and reduced to ruin. A special officer was appointed 
by the town to receive contributions for the ransom of 
citizens carried off by the corsairs of Algiers or Tunis. 
These terrible razzias, which went on to the very close 
of the last century, have left their mark on the popular 
traditions of the coast. But the ruin which they began 
was consummated by the purposeless bombardment of 
San Remo by an English fleet during the war of the 
Austrian Succession, and by the perfidy with which 
Genoa crushed, at a single blow, the freedom she had 
respected for so many centuries. The square Genoese 
fort near the harbor commemorates the extinction of 
the liberty of San Remo in 1729. The French Revolu- 
tion found the city ruined and enslaved, and the grati- 
tude of the citizens for their deliverance by Bonaparte 
was shown by a sacrifice which it is hard to forgive 
them. A row of magnificent ilexes, which stretched 
along the ridge from the town to San Romolo, is said to 
have been felled for the construction of vessels for the 
French navy. 

Some of the criticism which has been lavished on 



80 STRAY STUDIES. 

San Remo is fair and natural enough. To any one 
who has been accustomed to the exquisite scenery 
around Cannes its background of olives seems tame 
and monotonous. People who are fond of the bustle 
and gayety of Nizza or Mentone in their better days 
can hardly find much to amuse them in San Remo. It 
is certainly quiet, and its quiet verges upon dullness. 
A more serious drawback lies in the scarcity of prom- 
enades or level walks for weaker invalids. For peo- 
ple with good legs, or who are at home on a donkey, 
there are plenty of charming walks and rides up into 
the hills. But it is not every body who is strong enough 
to walk uphill, or who cares to mount a donkey. Vis- 
itors with sensitive noses may perhaps find reason for 
growls at the mode of cultivation which is characteris- 
tic of the olive-groves. The town itself and the country 
around are, like the bulk of the Riviera, entirely with- 
out architectural or archaeological interest. There is a 
fine castle within a long drive at Dolceacqua, and a 
picturesque church still untouched within a short one 
at Ceriana; but this is all. Beneficial as the reforms 
of Carlo Borromeo may have been to the religious life 
of the Cornice, they have been fatal to its architecture. 
On the other hand, any one with an artistic eye and a 
sketch-book may pass his time pleasantly enough at San 
Remo. The botanist may revel day after day in new 
"finds" among its valleys and hill -sides. The rural 
quiet of the place delivers one from the fashionable 
bustle of livelier watering-places, from the throng of 



SAN REMO. 81 

gorgeous equipages that pour along the streets of Nice, 
or from picnics, with a host of flunkeys uncorking the 
Champagne. 

The sunshine, the color, the beauty of the little town, 
secure its future. The time must soon come when the 
whole coast of the Riviera will be lined with winter 
resorts; but we can hardly hope that any will surpass 
the happy blending of warmth and interest and repose 
which makes the charm of San Eemo. 

6 



THE POETIIY OF WEALTH, 



THE POETRY OF WEALTH. 



There is one marvelous tale which is hardly likely 
to be forgotten so long as men can look clown from 
Notre Dame cle la Garde on the sunny beauty of Mar- 
seilles. Even if the rest of Dumas' works sink into 
oblivion, the sight of Chateau d'lf as it rises glowing 
from the blue waters of the Mediterranean will serve 
to recall the wonders of "Monte Cristo." But the 
true claim of the book to remembrance lies not in its 
mere command over the wonderful, but in the peculiar 
sense of wonder which it excites. It was the first liter- 
ary attempt to raise the mere dead fact of money into 
the sphere of the imagination, and to reveal the dormant 
poetry of wealth. There has as yet been only a single 
age in the world's history when wealth has told with 
any force upon the imagination of men. Unpoetic as 
the Roman mind essentially was, the sudden burst upon 
it of the accumulated riches of the older world kindled 
in senators and proconsuls a sense of romance which, 
wild and extravagant as it seems, has in some of its 
qualities found no parallel since. The feast of Lucul- 
lus, the gluttony of ITeliogabalus, the sudden upgrowth 



86 STKAY STUDIES. 

of vast amphitheatres, the waste of millions on the sport 
of a day, the encounters of navies in the mimic war- 
fare of the Coliseum, are the freaks of gigantic chil- 
dren tossing about wildly the slowly hoarded treasures 
of past generations; but they are freaks which for the 
first time revealed the strange possibilities which lay in 
the future of wealth. 

It is hard to say whether such a time will ever re- 
turn. No doubt, the world is infinitely richer now than 
it was in the time of the Romans, and no doubt, too, 
there are at least a dozen people in London alone whose 
actual income far exceeds that of the wealthiest of pro- 
consuls. But the wealth of the modern capitalist is 
a wealth which has grown by slow accumulations, a 
wealth which has risen almost insensibly into its enor- 
mous mass, and the vastness of which its owner has 
never had brought home to him with the same sort of 
shock as that which Lucullus must have felt when he 
fronted the treasures of Mithridates, or dive when he 
threaded his way among the sacks of jewels in the roy- 
al vaults of Moorshedabad. So far, indeed, is wealth 
from stimulating the imagination nowadays, that a 
banker is the very type of the unimaginative man, and 
the faintest suspicion of genius is enough to render a 
financier an object of suspicion to the money market. 
But it is conceivable, in the odd freaks of things, that 
we may yet see the advent of the poet-capitalist. It is 
almost impossible to say what new opportunities the 



THE POETRY OF WEALTH. 87 

possession of fabulous resources might not add to the 
fancy of a dreamer, or to the speculations of a philan- 
thropist. It is not till after a little thought that we 
realize how materially the course of human progress is 
obstructed by sheer want of money at critical moments, 
or how easily the sum of human happiness might be in- 
creased by the sudden descent of a golden shower on 
the right people at the right time. 

There are dreams which men have been dreaming 
for generation after generation which require nothing 
for their realization but the appearance of such a cap- 
italist as we have imagined. To take what may seem, 
perhaps, an odd instance, just because it is an odd in- 
stance, let us remember what a wonderful amount of 
hope and anticipation has been thrown by a great relig- 
ious party into the restoration of the Jews. Rightly or 
wrongly, it is the one theme which sends a throb of ex- 
citement through the life of quiet parsonages, and kin- 
dles a new fire even in the dreariest May meetings at 
Exeter Hall. But in point of actual fact there is not 
the slightest necessity to await any great spiritual revo- 
lution for the accomplishment of such a dream, if its 
accomplishment were really desirable. A league of 
Evangelical bankers who fully believed in the prophe- 
cies they are so fond of quoting, could turn the wildest 
fancies of Dr. Gumming into sober earnest with very 
little trouble indeed. Any emigration agent would un- 
dertake the transport of Houndsditch bodily to Joppa; 



88 STRAY STUDIES. 

the bare limestone uplands of Judea could be covered 
again with terraces of olive and vine at precisely the 
same cost of money and industry as is still required to 
keep up the cultivation of the Riviera ; and Mr. Fergus- 
son would furnish, for a due consideration, plans and 
estimates for a restoration of the Temple on Zion. We 
are not suggesting such a scheme as an opportunity for 
investing money to any great profit; but it is odd to 
live in a world of wealthy people who believe firmly 
that its realization would make this world into a little 
heaven below, and yet never seem to feel that they have 
the means of bringing it about in their check-books. 
Or, to take a hardly less odd instance, but one which 
lias actually been brought a little nearer to practical 
realization : Some time ago, a body of Welsh patriots 
determined to save the tongue and literature of the 
Cymry from extinction by founding a new Welsh na- 
tion on the shores of Patagonia. Nothing but Welsh 
was to be spoken, none but Welsh books were to be 
read, and the laws of the colony were to be an amalgam 
of the codes of Moses and of Howel the Good. The 
plan failed simply because its originators were poor, 
and unable to tide over the first difficulties of the proj- 
ect. But conceive an ardent capitalist with a passion 
for nationalities embracing such a cause, and at the 
cost of a few hundreds of thousands creating perhaps a 
type of national life which might, directly or indirect- 
ly, affect the future of the world. Such a man might 
secure himself a niche in history at less cost and with 



THE POETKY OF WEALTH. 89 

less trouble than he could obtain a large estate, and 
a share in the commission of the peace for a Midland 
county. 

But there is no need to restrict ourselves simply to 
oddities, although oddities of this sort acquire a grand- 
eur of their own at the touch of wealth. The whole 
field of social experiment lies open to a great capitalist. 
The one thing required, for instance, to render the 
squalor and misery of our larger towns practically im- 
possible would be the actual sight of a large town with- 
out squalor or misery ; and yet if Liverpool were simply 
handed over to a great philanthropist with the income 
of half a dozen Dukes of Westminster, such a sight 
might easily be seen. Schemes of this sort require 
nothing but what we may term the poetic employment 
of capital for their realization. It is strange that no 
financial hero makes his appearance to use his great 
money -club to fell direr monsters than those which 
Hercules encountered, and, by the creation of a city at 
once great, beautiful, and healthy, to realize the concep- 
tion of the Utopia and the dream of Sir Thomas More. 
Or, take a parallel instance from the country: Those 
who have watched the issues of the co-operative system 
as applied to agriculture believe they see in it the future 
solution of two of our greatest social difficulties — those, 
we mean, which spring from the increasing hardships 
of the farmer's position, and those which arise from the 
terrible serfage of the rural laborer. But the experi- 



90 STRAY STUDIES. 

ments which have been as yet carried on are on too 
small a scale either to produce any influence on the la- 
bor market as a whole, or to make that impression on the 
public imagination which could alone raise the matter 
into a " question of the day." What is wanted is simply 
that two or three dukes should try the experiment of 
peasant co-operation on a whole county, and try it with 
a command of capital which would give the experiment 
fair play. Whether it succeeded or not, such an at- 
tempt would have a poetic and heroic aspect of a differ- 
ent order from the usual expenditure of a British peer. 

Or we may turn to a wholly different field, the field 
of art. We are always ready to cry out against " pot 
boilers" as we wander through the galleries of the 
Academy, and to grumble at the butchers' bills and 
bonnet bills which stand between great artists and the 
production of great works. But the butchers' bills and 
bonnet bills of all the forty Academicians might be 
paid by a great capitalist without any deep dip into his 
money-bags, and a whole future opened to English art 
by the sheer poetry of wealth. There are hundreds 
of men with special faculties for scientific inquiry who 
are at the present moment pinned down to the daily 
drudgery of the lawyer's desk, or the doctor's consult- 
ing-room, by the necessities of daily bread. A Roths- 
child who would take a score of natural philosophers, 
and enable them to apply their whole energies to inves- 
tigation, would help forward science as really as ISTew- 



THE POETRY OF WEALTH. 91 

ton himself, if less directly. But there are even direct 
ways in which wealth on a gigantic scale might put 
out a poetic force which would affect the very fort- 
unes of the world. There are living people who are 
the masters of twenty millions; and twenty millions 
would drive a tunnel under the Straits of Dover. If 
increased intercourse means, as is constantly contend- 
ed, an increase of friendship and of mutual understand- 
ing among nations, the man who devoted a vast wealth 
to linking two peoples together would rise at once to 
the level of the great benefactors of mankind. An op- 
portunity for a yet more direct employment of the in- 
fluence of wealth will some day or other be found in 
the field of international politics. Already those who 
come in contact with the bi^-wi^s of the financial 
world hear whispers of a future when the destinies of 
peoples are to be decided in bank parlors, and questions 
of peace and war settled, not by the diplomatist and 
statesman, but by the capitalist. But as yet these are 
mere whispers, and no European Gould has risen up to 
" finance " Downing Street into submission, or to meet 
the boldest move of Prince Bismarck by a fall of the • 
Stock Exchange. Of all the schemes, however, which 
we have suggested, this is probably the nearest to prac- 
tical realization. If not we ourselves, our children, at 
any rate, may see international congresses made possi- 
ble by a few people cpiietly buttoning their breeches- 
pockets, and the march of " armed nations " arrested by 
" a run for gold." 



92 STRAY STUDIES. 

Taking, however, men as they are, it is far more 
wonderful that no one has hit on the enormous field 
which wealth opens for the development of sheer, 
downright mischief. The sense of mischief is a sense 
which goes quietly to sleep as soon as childhood is over, 
from mere want of opportunity. The boy who wants 
to trip np his tutor can easily find a string to tie across 
the garden walk; but when one has got beyond the 
simpler joys of childhood, strings are not so easy to 
find. To carry out a practical joke of the Christopher 
Sly sort, we require, as Shakspeare saw, the resources 
of a prince. But once grant possession of unlimited 
wealth, and the possibilities of mischief rise to a grand- 
eur such as the world has never realized. The Erie 
King taught us a little of what capital might do in 
this way; but in the Erie Ring capital was fettered 
by considerations of profit and loss. Throw these con- 
siderations overboard, and treat a great question in 
the spirit of sheer mischief, and the results may be 
simply amazing. Conceive, for instance, a capitalist 
getting the railways round London into his power, 
and then, in sheer freak, stopping the traffic for a sin- 
gle day. No doubt, the day would be a short one ; 
but even twelve hours of such a practical joke would 
bring about a "Black Monday" such as England has 
never seen. But there would be no need of such an 
enormous operation to enable us to realize the power 
of latent mischief which the owner of great wealth 
really possesses. An adroit operator might secure every 



THE POETRY OF WEALTH. 93 

omnibus and every cab in the metropolis, and compel 
us to paddle about for a week in the mud of November 
before the loss was replaced. 

It is quite possible, indeed, that gigantic mischief of 
this sort may find its sphere in practical politics. Al- 
ready continental governments watch with anxiety the 
power which employers possess of bringing about a 
revolution by simply closing their doors and throwing 
thousands of unemployed laborers on the street ; but it 
is a power which in some degree or other capital will al- 
ways possess ; and any one who remembers the assistance 
which Reform derived from the Hyde Park rows will 
see at once that mischief on the large scale might be made 
in this way an important factor in political questions. 

Ambition has yet a wider sphere of action than 
even mischief, in this poetic use of wealth. A London 
preacher recently drew pointed attention to the merely 
selfish use of their riches by great English nobles, and 
contrasted it with the days when Elizabeth's Lords of 
the Council clubbed together to provide an English fleet 
against the Armada, or the nobles of Venice placed 
their wealth on every great emergency at the service of 
the State. But, from any constitutional point of view, 
there is, perhaps, nothing on which we may more heart- 
ily congratulate ourselves than on the blindness which 
hides from the great capitalists of England the polit- 
ical power which such a national employment of their 



94 STRAY STUDIES. 

wealth would give them — a blindness which is all the 
more wonderful in what is at once the wealthiest and 
the most political aristocracy which the world has ever 
seen. What fame the mere devotion of a quarter of a 
million to public uses may give to a quiet merchant, 
the recent example of Mr. Peabody abundantly showed. 
But the case of the Baroness Burdett Coutts is yet more 
strictly to the point. The mere fact that she has been 
for years credited with a wide and unselfish benevo- 
lence has given her a power over the imagination of 
vast masses of the London poor which no one who is 
not really conversant with their daily life and modes of 
thinking could for an instant imagine. Her bounty is 
enlarged in the misty air of the slums of Wapping or 
Potherhithe to colossal dimensions, and the very quiet- 
ness and unobtrusiveness of her work give it an air of 
mysteiy which tells like romance on the fancy of the 
poor. 

It was characteristic of the power which such a use 
of wealth may give, that the mobs who smashed the 
Hyde Park railings stopped to cheer before the house 
of Lady Burdett Coutts. Luckily none of our political 
nobles has ever bethought himself of the means by 
which the great Roman leaders rose habitually to influ- 
ence, or won over the laboring masses by "panem et 
Circenses." But a nobler ambition might find its field 
in a large employment of wealth for public ends of a 
higher sort. Something of the old patrician pride might 



THE POETRY OF WEALTH. 95 

have spurred the five or six great houses who own half 
London to construct the Thames embankment at their 
own cost, and to hand it over, free from the hioffrlinsrs 
of Mr. Gore, to the people at large. Even now we may 
hear of some earl whose rent-roll is growing with fabu- 
lous rapidity as coming forward to relieve the Treasury 
by the offer of a National Gallery of Art, or check- 
mating the jobbers of South Kensington by the erection 
of a National Museum. It seems to be easy enough for 
peer after peer to fling away a hundred thousand at 
Newmarket or Tattersall's, and yet a hundred thousand 
would establish in the crowded haunts of working Lon- 
don great " conservatoires," where the finest music might 
be brought to bear without cost on the coarseness and 
vulgarity of the life of the poor. The higher drama 
may be perishing in default of a state subvention ; but 
it never seems to enter any one's head that there are 
dozens of people among those who grumbled at the ar- 
tistic taste of Mr. Ayrton who could furnish such a sub- 
vention at the present cost of their stable. As yet, how- 
ever, we must be content, we suppose, with such a use 
of wealth as " Lothair " brings to the front — the purely 
selfish use of it carried to the highest pitch which, self- 
ishness has ever reached. Great parks and great houses, 
costly studs and costly conservatories, existence relieved 
of every hitch and discomfort — these are the outlets 
which wealth has as yet succeeded in finding. For no- 
bler outlets we must wait for the advent of the poet- 
capitalist. 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 



A little higher up the river, but almost opposite to 
the huge mass of the Houses of Parliament, lies a bro- 
ken, irregular pile of buildings, at whose angle, looking 
out over the Thames, is one gray weather-beaten tower. 
The broken pile is the arehiepiscopal Palace of Lam- 
beth ; the gray, weather-beaten building is its Lollards' 
Tower. From this tower the mansion itself stretches in 
a varied line ; chapel, and guard-room, and gallery, and 
the stately buildings of the new house looking out on 
the terrace and garden ; while the Great Hall, in which 
the library has now found a home, is the low pictur- 
esque building which reaches southward along the river 
to the gate. 

The story of each of these spots will interweave it- 
self with the thread of our narrative as we proceed; 
but I would warn my readers at the outset that I do not 
purpose to trace the history of Lambeth in itself, or to 
attempt any architectural or picturesque description of 
the place. What I attempt is simply to mark, in inci- 
dent after incident which has occurred within its walls, 
the relation of the house to the primates whom it has 



100 STRAY STUDIES. 

sheltered for seven hundred years, and through them to 
the literary, the ecclesiastical, the political history of the 
realm. 

Nothing illustrates the last of these relations better 
than the site of the house itself. It is doubtful whether 
we can date the residence of the archbishops of Canter- 
bury at Lambeth, which was then a manor-house of the 
see of Rochester, earlier than the reign of Eadward the 
Confessor. But there was a significance in the choice 
of the spot, as there was a significance in the date at 
which the choice was made. So long as the political 
head of the English people ruled, like JElfred, or JEth- 
elstan, or Eadgar, from Winchester, the spiritual head 
of the English people was content to rule from Canter- 
bury. It w T as when the piety of the Confessor and the 
political prescience of his successors brought the kings 
finally to Westminster that the archbishops were perma- 
nently drawn to their suffragan's manor-house at Lam- 
beth. The Norman rule gave a fresh meaning to their 
position. In the new course of national history which 
opened with the Conquest, the Church was called to 
play a part greater than she had ever known before. 
Hitherto the archbishop had been simply the head of 
the ecclesiastical order — a representative of the moral 
and spiritual forces on which government was based. 
The Conquest, the cessation of the great Witenagemotes 
in which the nation, however imperfectly, had till then 
found a voice, turned him into a tribune of the people. 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 101 

Foreigner though he might be, it was the primate's 
part to speak for the conquered race the words it could 
no longer utter. He was, in fact, the permanent leader 
(to borrow a modern phrase) of a constitutional oppo- 
sition ; and, in addition to the older religious forces 
which he wielded, he wielded a popular and democratic 
force which held the new king and the new baronage 
in check. It was he who received from the sovereign 
whom he crowned the solemn oath that he would rule 
not by his own will, but according to the customs, or, 
as we should say now, the traditional constitution, of 
the realm. It was his to call on the people to declare 
whether they chose him for their king; to receive the 
thundered "Ay, ay," of the crowd ; to place the priest- 
ly unction on shoulder and breast, the royal crown on 
brow. To watch over the observance of the covenant 
of that solemn day; to raise obedience and order into 
religious duties; to uphold the custom and law of the 
realm against personal tyranny; to guard, amidst the 
darkness and brutality of the age, those interests of re- 
ligion, of morality, of intellectual life, which as yet lay 
peacefully together beneath the wing of the Church — 
this was the political office of the primate in the new 
order which the Conquest created ; and it was this office 
which expressed itself in the site of the house that front- 
ed the king's house over Thames. 

From the days of Archbishop Anselm, therefore, to 
the days of Stephen Langton, Lambeth only fronted 



102 STRAY STUDIES. 

Westminster as the archbishop fronted the king. Syn- 
od met over against council ; the clerical court of the 
one ruler rivaled in splendor, in actual influence, the ba- 
ronial court of the other. For more than a century of 
our history the great powers which together were to 
make up the England of the future lay marshaled over 
against each other on either side the water. 



With the union of the English people, and the sudden 
arising of English freedom, which followed the Great 
Charter, this peculiar attitude of the archbishops passed 
necessarily away. When the people itself spoke again, 
its voice was heard, not in the hall of Lambeth, but in 
the Chapter-house which gave a home to the House of 
Commons in its earlier sessions at Westminster. From 
the day of Stephen Langton the nation has towered 
higher and higher above its mere ecclesiastical organi- 
zation, till the one stands dwarfed beside the other as 
Lambeth now stands dwarfed before the mass of the 
Llouses of Parliament. Nor was the religious change 
less than the political. In the Church as in the State, 
the archbishops suddenly fell into the rear. From the 
days of the first English Parliament to the days of the 
Information, they not only cease to be representatives 
of the moral and religious forces of the nation, but stand 
actually opposed to them. Nowhere is this better 
brought out than in their house beside the Thames. 
The political history of Lambeth lies spread over the 
whole of its site, from the gate- way of Morton to the 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 103 

garden where we shall see Cranmer musing on the fate 
of Anne Boleyn. Its ecclesiastical interest, on the other 
hand, is concentrated in a single spot. We must ask 
our readers, therefore, to follow us beneath the groining 
of the Gate-house into the quiet little court that lies on 
the river-side of the hall. Passing over its trim grass- 
plot to a door-way at the angle of Lollards' Tower, and 
mounting a few steps, they will find themselves in a 
square antechamber, paved roughly with tiles, and with 
a single small window looking out toward the Thames. 
The chamber is at the base of Lollards' Tower; in the- 
centre stands a huge oaken pillar, to which the room 
owes its name of the " Post-room," and to which some- 
what mythical tradition asserts Lollards to have been 
tied when they were " examined " by the whip. On its 
western side a door -way of the purest early English 
work leads us directly into the palace chapel. 

It is strange to stand at a single step in the very heart 
of the ecclesiastical life of so many ages, within walls 
beneath which the men in whose hands the fortunes of 
English religion have been placed from the age of the 
Great Charter till to-day have come and gone; to see 
the light falling through the tall windows with their 
marble shafts on the spot where Wyclif fronted Sud- 
bury, on the lowly tomb of Parker, on the stately screen- 
work of Laud, on the altar where the last sad commun- 
ion of San croft originated the Non-jurors. It is strange 
to note the very characteristics of the building itself, 



104 STRAY STUDIES. 

marred as it is by modern restoration, and to feel how 
simply its stern, unadorned beauty, the beauty of Salis- 
bury and of Lincoln, expressed the very tone of the 
Church that finds its centre there. 

And hardly less strange is it to recall the odd, roist- 
ering figure of the primate to whom, if tradition be 
true, it owes this beauty. Boniface of Savoy was the 
youngest of three brothers out of whom their niece El- 
eanor, the queen of Henry the Third, was striving to 
build up a foreign party in the realm. Her uncle Am- 
adeus was richly enfeoffed with English lands; the Sa- 
voy Palace in the Strand still recalls the settlement and 
the magnificence of her uncle Peter. For this third 
and younger uncle she grasped at the highest post in 
the state save the crown itself. " The handsome arch- 
bishop," as his knights loved to call him, was not mere- 
ly a foreigner as Lanfranc and Ansel m had been for- 
eigners — strange in manner or in speech to the flock 
whom they ruled — he was foreign in the worst sense: 
strange to their freedom, their sense of law, their rever- 
ence for piety. His first visit set every thing on fire. 
He retreated to Lyons to hold a commission in the 
pope's body-guard, but even Innocent was soon weary 
of his tyranny. When the threat of sequestration re- 
called him after four years of absence to his see, his ha- 
tred of England, his purpose soon to withdraw again to 
his own sunny South, were seen in his refusal to furnish 
Lambeth. Certainly he went the wrong way to stay 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 105 

here. The young primate brought with him Savoyard 
fashions, strange enough to English folk. His armed 
retainers, foreigners to a man, plundered the City mar- 
kets. His own archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground 
a prior who opposed his visitation. It was the prior of 
St. Bartholomew's by Smithfield ; and London, on the 
king's refusal to grant redress, took the matter into her 
own hands. The City bells swung out, and a noisy 
crowd of citizens were soon swarming beneath the walls 
of the palace, shouting threats of vengeance. 

For shouts Boniface cared little. In the midst of the 
tumult he caused the sentences of excommunication 
which he had fulminated to be legally executed in the 
chapel of his house. But, bravado-like, this soon died 
before the universal resentment, and "the handsome 
archbishop " fled again to Lyons. How helpless the suc- 
cessor of Augustine really was, was shown by a daring 
outrage perpetrated in his absence. Master Eustace, his 
official, had thrown into prison the prior of St. Thomas's 
Llospital for some contempt of court ; and the prior's 
diocesan, the Bishop of Winchester, a prelate as foreign 
and lawless as ftoniface himself, took up the injury as 
his own. A party of his knights appeared before the 
house at Lambeth, tore the gates from their hinges, set 
Master Eustace on horseback, and carried him off to the 
episcopal prison at Farnham. At last Boniface bowed 
to submission, surrendered the points at issue, recalled 
his excommunications, and was suffered to return. He 



106 STRAY STUDIES. 

had learned his lesson well enough to remain from that 
time a quiet, inactive man, with a dash of Continental 
frugality and wit about him. Whether he built the 
chapel or not, he would probably have said of it as he 
said of the Great Hall at Canterbury, " My predecessors 
built, and I discharge the debt for their building. It 
seems to me that the true builder is the man that pays 
the bill." 

But Boniface never learned to be an Englishman. 
When, under the guidance of Earl Simon of Montfort, 
the barons wrested the observance of their charter from 
the king, the Primate of England found shelter in a 
fresh exile. The Church had, in fact, ceased to be na- 
tional. The figure of the first Reformer, as he stands 
on the chapel floor, is in itself the fittest comment on 
the age in which the chapel was built — an age when the 
interests of popular liberty and of intellectual freedom 
had sheered off from the Church which had so long 
been their protector. With them the moral and spirit- 
ual life of the people sheered off too. The vast ecclesi- 
astical fabric rested in the days of Archbishop Sudbury 
solely on its wealth and its tradition. Suddenly a sin- 
gle man summed up in himself the national, the mental, 
the moral power it had lost, and struck at the double 
base on which it rested. Wyclif, the keenest intellect 
of his day, national and English to the very core, de- 
clared its tradition corrupt and its wealth antichrist. 
The two forces that above all had built up the system 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 107 

of mediseval Christianity, the subtlety of the school- 
man, the enthusiasm of the penniless preacher, united 
to strike it down. 

It is curious to mark how timidly the primate of the 
day dealt with such a danger as this." Sudbury was 
acting in virtue of a papal injunction, but he acted as 
though the shadow of the terrible doom that was await- 
ing him had already fallen over him. He summoned 
the popular Bishop of London to his aid ere he cited 
the Reformer to his judgment-seat. It was not as a 
prisoner that Wyclif appeared in the chapel : from the 
first his tone w T as that of a man who knew that he was 
secure. He claimed to have the most favorable con- 
struction put upon his w T ords ; then, availing himself of 
his peculiar subtlety of interpretation, he demanded that 
where they might bear two meanings his judges should 
take them in an orthodox sense. It was not a noble 
scene — there was little in it of Luther's " Here stand I 
— I can none other ;" but both sides were, in fact, act- 
ing a part. On the one hand, the dead pressure of ec- 
clesiastical fanaticism was driving the primate into a 
position from which he sought only to escape ; on the 
other, Wyclif was merely gaining time — " beating step," 
as men say — with his scholastic formulae. What he 
looked for soon came. There was a rumor in the City 
that papal delegates were sitting in judgment on the 
Reformer, and London was at once astir. Crowds of 
angry citizens flocked round the archiepiscopal house, 



108 STRAY STUDIES. 

and already there was talk of attacking it, when a mes- 
sage from the Council of Regency commanded a sus- 
pension of all proceedings in the case. Sudbury dis- 
missed his prisoner with a formal injunction, and .the 
day was forever lost to the Church. 

But if in Sudbury the Church had retreated peace- 
ably before Wyclif, it was not from any doubt of the 
deadly earnestness of the struggle that lay before her. 
Archbishop Chichele's accession to the primacy was the 
signal for the building of Lollards' Tower. Dr. Mait- 
land has shown that the common name rests on a mere 
error, and that the Lollards' Tower which meets us so 
grimly in the pages of Foxe was really a western tower 
of St. Paul's. But, as in so many other instances, the 
popular voice showed a singular historical tact in its 
mistake ; the tower which Chichele raised marked, more 
than any other, in the very date of its erection the new 
age of persecution on which England was to enter. 
From a gate- way in the northern side of the Post-room 
worn stone steps lead up to a dungeon in which many a 
prisoner for the faith must have lain. The massive oak- 
en door, the iron rings bolted into the wall, the one nar- 
row window looking out over the river, tell their tale as 
well as the broken sentences scratched or carved around. 
Some are mere names ; here and there some light-pated 
youngster paying for his night's uproar has carved his 
dice or his " Jesus kep me out of all il compane, Amen." 
But "Jesus est amor mens" is sacred, whether Lollard 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 109 

or Jesuit graved it in the lonely prison hours, and not 
less sacred the "Deo sit gratiarum actio" that marks, 
perhaps, the leap of a martyr's heart at the news of the 
near advent of his fiery deliverance. It is strange to 
think, as one winds once more down the stairs that 
such feet have trodden, how soon England answered to 
the challenge that Lollards' Tower flung out over the 
Thames. The white masonry had hardly grown gray 
under the bufferings of a hundred years ere Lollard was 
no longer a word of shame, and the reformation that 
Wyclif had begun sat enthroned within the walls of the 
chapel where he had battled for his life. 

The attitude of the primates, indeed, showed that 
sooner or later such a reformation was inevitable. From 
the moment when Wyclif stood in Lambeth Chapel the 
Church sunk, ecclesiastically as well as politically, into 
non-existence. It survived merely as a vast land-owner ; 
while its primates, after a short effort to resume their 
older position as real heads of their order, dwindled into 
ministers and tools of the crown. The Gate-tower of 
the house, the grand mass of brick- work, whose dark- 
red tones are (or, alas ! were, till a year or two since) so 
exquisitely brought out by the gray stone of its angles 
and the mullions of its broad arch-window, recalls an 
age — that of its builder, Archbishop Morton — when 
Lambeth, though the residence of the first minister of 
the crown, had really lost all hold on the nobler ele- 
ments of political life. It was raised from this degra- 



110 STKAY STUDIES. 

dation by the efforts of a primate to whose merits jus- 
tice has hardly as yet been clone. First in date among 
the genuine portraits of the Archbishops of Canterbury 
which hang round the walls of the Guard-room at Lam- 
beth is the portrait of Archbishop Warham. The plain, 
homely old man's face still looks down on us, line for 
line, as the "seeing eye" of Holbein gazed on it three 
centuries ago. " I instance this picture," says Mr. Wor- 
num, in his life of the painter, " as an illustration that 
Holbein had the power of seeing what he looked on, 
and of perfectly transferring to his picture what he 
saw." Memorable in the annals of art as the first of 
that historic series w T hich brings home to us, as no age 
has ever been brought home to eyes of after-time, the 
age of the English Reformation, it is even more mem- 
orable as marking the close of the great intellectual 
movement which the Reformation swept away. 

It was with a letter from Erasmus in his hands that 
Hans Holbein stood before the aged archbishop, still 
young as when he sketched himself at Basle with the 
fair, frank, manly face, the sweet, gentle mouth, the 
heavy red cap flinging its shade over the mobile, melan- 
choly brow. But it was more than the " seventy years " 
that he has so carefully noted above it that the artist 
saw in the primate's face ; it was the still, impassive 
calm of a life's disappointment. Only ten years before, 
at the very moment when the painter first made his en- 
try into Basle, Erasmus had been forwarding to England 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. Ill 

the great work in which he had recalled theologians to 
the path of sound Biblical criticism. "Every lover of 
letters," the great scholar wrote sadly, after the old man 
had gone to his rest — "every lover of letters owes to 
Warham that he is the possessor of my ' Jerome ;' " and, 
with an acknowledgment of the primate's bounty such 
as he alone in Christendom could give, the edition bore 
in its forefront his memorable dedication to the arch- 
bishop. That Erasmus could find protection for such a 
work in Warham's name, that he could address him 
in words so bold and outspoken as those of his preface, 
tells us how completely the old man sympathized with 
the highest tendencies of the New Learning. 

Of the Renascence, that "new birth" of the world — 
for I cling to a word so eminently expressive of a truth 
that historians of our day seem inclined to forget or to 
deny — of that regeneration of mankind through the sud- 
den upgrowth of intellectual liberty, Lambeth was in 
England the shrine. With the Reformation which fol- 
lowed it Lambeth, as we shall see, had little to do. But 
the home of Warham was the home of the revival of 
letters. With a singular fitness, the venerable library 
which still preserves their tradition, ousted from its 
older dwelling-place by the demolition of the cloister, 
has in modern days found refuge in the Great Hall, the 
successor and copy of that hall where the men of the 
New Learning — where Colet, and More, and Grocyn, 
and Linacre — gathered round the table of Warham. 



112 STRAY STUDIES. 

It was with Grocyn that Erasmus rowed up the river 
to the primate's board. Warham addressed a few kind- 
ly words to the poor scholar before and after dinner, 
and then drawing him aside into a corner of the hall 
(his usual way when he made a present to any one) 
slipped into his hand an acknowledgment for the book 
and dedication he had brought with him. " How much 
did the archbishop give you?" asked his companion, 
as they rowed home again. "An immense amount!" 
replied Erasmus, but his friend saw the discontent on 
his face, and drew from him how small the sum really 
was. Then the disappointed scholar burst into a string 
of indignant questions : was Warham miserly, or was 
he poor, or did he really think such a present expressed 
the value of the book? Grocyn frankly blurted out 
the true reason for Warham's economy in his shrewd 
suspicion that this was not the first dedication that had 
been prefixed to the " Hecuba," and it is likely enough 
that the primate's suspicion was right. At any rate, 
Erasmus owns that Grocyn's sardonic comment, "It is 
the way with you scholars/' stuck in his mind even when 
he returned to Paris, and made him forward to the 
archbishop a perfectly new translation of the " Iphi- 



Few men seem to have realized more thoroughly 
than Warham the new conception of an intellectual 
and moral equality before which the old social distinc- 
tions were to vanish away. In his intercourse with this 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 113 

group of friends lie seems utterly unconscious of the 
exalted station which he occupied in the eyes of men. 
Take such a story as Erasmus tells of a visit of Dean 
Colet to Lambeth. The dean took Erasmus in the boat 
with him, and read, as they rowed along a section call- 
ed " The Remedy for Anger," in his friend's popular 
"Hand-book of the Christian Soldier." When they 
reached the hall, however, Colet plumped gloomily 
down by Warham's side, neither eating nor drinking 
nor speaking, in spite of the archbishop's good-humor- 
ed attempt to draw him into conversation. It was only 
by starting the new topic of a comparison of ages that 
the archbishop was at last successful ; and when dinner 
was over, Colet's ill-temper had utterly fled. Erasmus 
saw him draw aside an old man who had shared their 
board, and engage in the friendliest greeting. " What 
a fortunate fellow you are !" began the impetuous dean, 
as the two friends stepped again into their boat ; " what 
a tide of good luck you bring with you !" Erasmus, of 
course, protested (one can almost see the half- earnest, 
half-humorous smile on his lip) that he was the most 
unfortunate fellow on earth. He was, at any rate, a 
bringer of good fortune to his friends, the dean retort- 
ed ; one friend at least he had saved from an unseemly 
outbreak of passion. At the archbishop's table, in fact, 
Colet had found himself placed opposite to an uncle 
with whom he hagl long waged a bitter family feud; 
and it was only the singular chance which had brought 
him thither fresh from the wholesome lessons of the 



114 STRAY STUDIES. 

" Hand-book " that had enabled the dean to refrain at 
the moment from open quarrel, and at last to get such 
a full mastery over his temper as to bring about a rec- 
onciliation with his kinsman. Colet was certainly very 
lucky in his friend's lessons, but he was perhaps quite 
as fortunate in finding a host so patient and good-tem- 
pered as Archbishop Warham. 

Primate and scholar were finally separated at last by 
the settlement of Erasmus at Basle ; but the severance 
brought no interruption to their friendship. " England 
is my last anchor," Erasmus wrote bitterly to a rich 
German prelate: "if that goes, I must beg." The 
anchor held as long as Warham lived. Years go by, 
but the primate is never tired of new gifts and remem- 
brances to the brave, sensitive scholar at whose heels 
all the ignorance and bigotry of Europe were yelping. 
Sometimes, indeed, he was luckless in his presents ; once \ 
he sent a horse to his friend, and, in spite of the well- 
known proverb about looking such a gift in the month, 
got a witty little snub for his pains. " He is, no doubt, 
a good steed at bottom," Erasmus gravely confesses, 
" but it must be owned lie is not overhandsome ; how- 
ever, he is, at any rate, free from all mortal sins, with 
,the trifling exceptions of gluttony and laziness! If he 
were only a father confessor now ! he has all the quali- 
ties to fit him for one — indeed, he is, only too prudent, 
modest, humble, chaste, and peaceable !" Still, admira- 
ble as these characteristics are, he is not quite the nag 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 115 

one expected. " I fancy that, through some knavery or 
blundering on your servant's part, I must have got a dif- 
ferent steed from the one you intended for me. In fact, 
now I come to remember, I had bidden my servant not 
to accept a horse except it were a good one ; but I am 
infinitely obliged to you all the same." Even Warham's 
temper must have been tried, as he laughed over such a 
letter as this ; but the precious work of art which Lam- 
beth contains proves that years only intensified their 
friendship. It was, as we have seen, with a letter of 
Erasmus in his hands, that, on his first visit to England, 
Holbein presented himself before Warham ; and Eras- 
mus responded to his friend's present of a copy of this 
portrait by forwarding a copy of his own. 

With the Reformation, in its nobler and purer aspects, 
Lambeth, as we have said, had little to do. Bucer, 
Peter Martyr, and Alasco gathered there for a moment 
round Cranmer ; but it was simply as a resting-place, on 
their way to Cambridge, to Oxford, and to Austin Friars. 
Only one of the symbols of the new Protestantism has 
any connection with it; the Prayer-book was drawn 
up in the peaceful seclusion of Otford. The party 
conferences, the rival martyrdoms of the jarring creeds, 
took place elsewhere. The memories of Cranmer which 
linger around Lambeth are simply memories of degra- 
dation ; and that the deepest degradation of all, the deg- 
radation of those solemn influences which the primacy 
embodies to the sanction of political infamy. It is fair, 



116 STRAY STUDIES. 

indeed, to remember the bitterness of Cranmer's suffer- 
ing. Impassive as he seemed, with a face that never 
changed, and sleep seldom known to be broken, men saw 
little of the inner anguish with which the tool of Hen- 
ry's injustice bent before that overmastering will. But 
seldom as it was that the silent lips broke into com- 
plaint, the pitiless pillage of his see wrung fruitless 
protests even from Cranmer. The pillage had begun 
on the very eve of his consecration, and from that mo- 
ment till the king's death Henry played the part of 
sturdy beggar for the archiepiscopal manors. Con- 
cession followed concession, and yet none sufficed to 
purchase security. The archbishop lived in the very 
shadow of death. At one time he heard the music of 
the royal barge as it passed Lambeth, and hurried to 
the water -side to greet the king. "I have news for 
you, my chaplain !" Henry broke out with his rough 
laugh, as he drew Cranmer on board ; " I know .now 
who is the greatest heretic in Kent !" and, pulling a 
paper from his sleeve, he showed him his denunciation 
by the prebendaries of his own cathedral. At another 
time he was summoned from his bed, and crossed the 
river to find Henry pacing the gallery at Whitehall, 
and to hear that, on the petition of the council, the king 
had consented to his committal to the Tower. The law 
of the Six Articles parted him from wife and child. 
" Happy man that you are," Cranmer groaned to Alex- 
ander Ales, whom, with his wonted consideration for 
others, he had summoned to Lambeth to warn him 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 117 

of his danger as a married priest ; " happy man that 
yon are, that yon can escape ! I would that I could do 
the same. Truly my see would be no hinderance to 



The bitter words must have recalled to Ales words 
of hardly less bitterness which he had listened to on 
a visit to Lambeth years before. If there was one 
person upon earth whom Cranmer loved, it was Anne 
Boleyn. When the royal summons had called hitn to 
Lambeth to wait till the time arrived when his part was 
to be played in the murder of the queen, his affection 
found vent in words of a strange pathos. " I loved her 
not a little," he wrote to Henry, in fruitless intercession, 
"for the love which I judged her to bear toward God 
and his Gospel. I was most bound to her, of all creat- 
ures living." So he wrote, knowing there was wrong 
to be done toward the woman he loved, wronff which 
he alone could do, and knowing, too, that he would 
stoop to do it. The large garden stretched, away north- 
ward from his house then as now, but then thick, no 
doubt, with the elm -rows that vanished some thirty 
years back, as the great citj-'s smoke drifted over them, 
and here, in the early morning (it was but four o'clock), 
Ales, who had found sleep impossible, and had crossed 
the river in a boat to seek calm in the fresh air and 
stillness of the place, met Cranmer walking. On the 
preceding day Anne had gone through the mockery of 
her trial ; but to the world outside the little circle of 



118 STRAY STUDIES. 

the court nothing was known; and it was in utter un- 
consciousness of this that Ales told the archbishop he 
had been roused by a dream of her beheading. Cran- 
iner was startled out of his usual calm. " Don't you 
know, then," he asked, after a moment's silence, " what 
is to happen to-day ?" Then, raising his eyes to heaven, 
he added, with a wild burst of tears, " She who has 
been Queen of England on earth will this day become 
a queen in heaven ! Some hours afterward the queen 
stood before him as her judge, and passed back to the 
Tower and the block. 

Cranmer was freed by his master's death from this 
helplessness of terror, only to lend himself to the in- 
justice of the meaner masters who followed Henry. 
Their enemies were at least his own, and, kindly as 
from many instances we know his nature to have been, 
its very weakness made him spring eagerly in such an 
hour of deliverance at the opportunity of showing his 
power over those who so long held him down. On 
charges of the most frivolous nature Bishop Gardiner 
and Bishop Bonner were summoned before the arch- 
bishop at Lambeth, deposed from their sees, and flung 
into prison. It is only the record of their trials, as it 
still stands in the pages of Foxe, that can enable us to 
understand the violence of the reaction under Mary. 
Gardiner, with characteristic dignity, confined himself 
to simply refuting the charges brought against him and 
protesting against the injustice of the court. But the 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 119 

coarser, bull-dog nature of Bonner turned to bay. By 
gestures, by scoff, by plain English speech, he declared 
again and again his sense of the wrong that was being 
done. A temper naturally fearless was stung to brava- 
do by the sense of oppression. As he entered the hall 
at Lambeth, he passed straight by the archbishop and 
his fellow - commissioners, still keeping his cap on his 
head as though in unconsciousness of his presence. 
One who stood by plucked his sleeve, and bid him do 
reverence. Bonner turned laughingly round and ad- 
dressed the archbishop, " What, my lord, are you here % 
By my troth, I saw you not." " It was because you 
would not see," Cranmer sternly rejoined. " Well," re- 
plied Bonner, " you sent for me : have you any thing to 
say to me?" The charge was read. The bishop had 
been commanded in a sermon to acknowledge that the 
acts of the king during his minority were as valid as if 
he were of full age. The command was flatly in con- 
tradiction with existing statutes, and the bishop had no 
doubt disobeyed it. 

But Bonner was too adroit to make a direct answer 
to the charge. He gained time by turning suddenly 
on the question of the Sacrament ; he cited the appear- 
ance of Hooper as a witness in proof that it was really 
on this point that he was brought to trial, and he at last 
succeeded in arousing Cranmer's love of controversy. 
A reply of almost incredible profanity from the arch- 
bishop, if we may trust Foxe's report, rewarded Bon- 



120 STRAY STUDIES. 

ner's perseverance in demanding a statement of his be- 
lief. The bishop was not slow to accept the advantage 
he had gained. " I am right sorry to hear your grace 
speak these words," he said, with a grave shake of his 
head; and Cranmer was warned by the silence and 
earnest looks of his fellow-commissioners to break up 
the session. 

Three days after, the addition of Sir Thomas Smith, 
the bitterest of Reformers, to the number of his assess- 
ors emboldened Cranmer to summon Bonner ao-ain. 
The court met in the chapel, and the bishop was a sec- 
ond time commanded to reply to the charge. He ob- 
jected now to the admission of the evidence of either 
Hooper or Latimer, on the ground of their notorious 
heresy. " If that be the law," Cranmer replied, hastily, 
"it is no godly law." "It is the king's law used in 
the realm," Bonner bluntly rejoined. Again Cranmer's 
temper gave his opponent the advantage. " Ye be too 
full of your law," replied the angry primate ; " I would 
wish you had less knowledge in that law, and more 
knowledge in God's law and of your duty!" "Well," 
answered the bishop, with admirable self-command, 
"seeing your grace falleth to wishing, I can also wish 
many things to be in your person." It was in vain that 
Smith strove to brush away his objections with a con- 
temptuous " You do use us thus to be seen a common 
lawyer." " Indeed," the veteran canonist coolly retort- 
ed, " I knew the law ere you could read it !" There 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 121 

was nothing for it but a second adjournment of the 
court. At its next session all parties met in hotter 
mood. The bishop pulled Hooper's books on the Sac- 
rament from his sleeve, and began reading them aloud. 
Latimer lifted up his head, as he alleged, to still the ex- 
citement of the people who crowded the chapel, as Bon- 
ner believed, to arouse a tumult. Cries of "Yea, yea," 
" Na y, nay," interrupted Bonner's reading. The bishop 
turned round and faced the throng, crying out, in hu- 
morous defiance, "Ah ! woodcocks ! woodcocks !" The 
taunt was met with universal laughter, but the scene 
had roused Cranmer's temper as well as his own. The 
primate addressed himself to the people, protesting that 
Bonner w T as called in question for no such matter as 
he would persuade them. Again Bonner turned to the 
people with "Well, now, hear what the Bishop of Lon- 
don saith for his part ;" but the commissioners forbade 
him to speak more. The court was at last recalled to 
a quieter tone, but contests of this sort still varied the 
proceedings as they dragged their slow length along in 
chapel and hall. 

At last Cranmer resolved to make an end. Had he 
been sitting simply as archbishop, he reminded Bonner 
sharply, he might have expected more reverence and 
obedience from his suffragan. As it was, "at everv 
time that we have sitten in commission you have used 
such unseemly fashions, without all reverence or obe- 
dience, giving taunts and checks as well unto us, with 



122 STRAY STUDIES. 

divers of the servants and chaplains, as also unto certain 
of the ancientest that be here, calling them fools and 
daws, with such like, that you have given to the multi- 
tude an intolerable example of disobedience." "You 
show yourself to be a meet judge !" was Bonner's scorn- 
ful reply. It was clear he had no purpose to yield. 
The real matter at issue, he contended, was the doctrine 
of the Sacrament, and from the very court-room he sent 
his orders to the lord mayor to see that no heretical 
opinions were preached before him. At the close of 
the trial he once more addressed Cranmer, in solemn 
protest against his breach of the law. " I am sorry," he 
said, " that I, being a bishop, am thus handled at your 
grace's hand, but more sorry that you suffer abominable 
heretics to practice as they do in London and elsewhere 
— answer it as you can !" Then, bandying taunts with 
the throng, the indomitable bishop followed the officers 
to the Marshalsea. 

From the degradation of scenes like these, Lambeth 
was raised to new dignity and self-respect by the pri- 
macy of Parker. His consecration in the same chapel 
which had witnessed Wyclif's confession was the tri- 
umph of Wyclif's principles, the close of that storm of 
the Reformation, of that Catholic reaction, which ceased 
alike with the accession of Elizabeth. But it was far 
more than this. It was in itself a symbol of the Church 
of England as it stands to-day, of that quiet, illogical 
compromise between past and present which Parker 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 123 

and the queen were to mold into so lasting a shape. 
Every circumstance of the service marked the strange 
contrasts which were to be blended in the future of the 
English Church. The zeal of Edward the Sixth's day 
had dashed the stained glass from the casements of 
Lambeth ; the zeal of Elizabeth's day was soon to move, 
if it had not already moved, the holy table into the 
midst of the' chapel. But a reaction from the mere 
iconoclasm and bareness of Calvinistic Protestantism 
showed itself in the tapestries hung for the day along 
the eastern wall, and in the rich carpet which was 
spread over the floor. The old legal forms, the old Or- 
dination service, re-appeared ; but in their midst came 
the new spirit of the Reformation, the oath of submis- 
sion to the royal supremacy, the solemn gift no longer 
of the pastoral staff, but of the Bible. The very dress 
of the four consecrating bishops showed the same con- 
fusion. Barlow, with the archbishop's chaplains who 
assisted him in the office of the Communion, wore the 
silken copes of the older service ; Scory and Hodgskins, 
the fair linen surplice of the new. Yet more notewor- 
thy was the aged figure of Coverdale, " Father Cover- 
dale," as men used affectionately to call him, the well- 
known translator of the Bible, whose life had been so 
hardly wrung by royal intercession from Mary. Reject- 
ing the very surplice as popery, in his long Genevan 
cloak he marks the opening of the Puritan controversy 
over vestments which was to rage so fiercely from Par- 
ker on to Laud. 



124 STRAY STUDIES. 

The library of Parker, though no longer within its 
walls, is memorable in the literary history of Lambeth 
as the first of a series of such collections made after his 
time by successive archbishops. Many of these, indeed, 
have passed away. The manuscripts of Parker form the 
glory of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; the Ori- 
ental collections of Laud are among the most precious 
treasures of the Bodleian. In puerile revenge for his 
fall, Sancroft withdrew his books from Lambeth, and 
bequeathed them to Emmanuel College. The library 
which the munificence of Tenison bequeathed to his old 
parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields has been dispersed 
by a shameless act of vandalism within our own mem- 
ories. An old man's caprice deposited the papers of 
Archbishop Wake at Christ Church. But the treasures 
thus dispersed are, with the exception of the Parker 
MSS., far surpassed by the collections that remain. I 
can not attempt here to enter with any detail into the 
nature of the history of the archiepiscopal library. It 
owes its origin to Archbishop Bancroft ; it was largely 
supplemented by his successor, Abbot, and still more 
largely, after a long interval, by the book -loving pri- 
mates, Tenison and Seeker. The library of thirty thou- 
sand volumes still mainly consists of these collections, 
though it has been augmented by the smaller bequests 
of Sheldon and Cornwallis, and in a far less degree by 
those of later archbishops. One has, at any rate, the re- 
pute of having augmented it during his primacy simply 
by a treatise on gout, and a book about butterflies. Of 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 125 

the twelve hundred volumes of manuscripts and papers, 
live hundred are due to Bancroft and Abbot, the rest 
mainly to Tenison, who purchased the " Carew Papers," 
the collections of Wharton, and the codices that bear 
his name. If Wake left his papers to Christ Church, in 
dread of the succession of Bishop Gibson, the bequest 
of Gibson's own papers more than made up the loss. 
The most valuable addition since Gibson's day has been 
that of the Greek codices, collected in the East at the 
opening of this century by Dr. Carlyle. 

The importance of Parker's primacy, however, was 
political and ecclesiastical, rather than literary. The 
first Protestant archbishop was not the man to stoop to 
servility, like Cranmer, nor was Elizabeth the queen to 
ask such stooping. But the concordat which the two 
tacitly arranged, the policy so resolutely clung to in spite 
of Burleigh and Walsingham, was, perhaps, a greater 
curse both to nation and to Church than the meanness 
of Cranmer. The steady support given by the crown to 
the new ecclesiastical organization which Parker mold- 
ed into shape was repaid by the conversion of every 
clergyman into the advocate of irresponsible govern- 
ment. It was as if publicly to ratify this concordat that 
the queen came in person to Lambeth in the spring of 
1573. On either side the chapel in that day stood a 
greater and lesser cloister. The last, which lay on the 
garden side, was swept away by the demolitions of the 
eighteenth century ; the first still fills the space between 



126 STRAY STUDIES. 

chapel and hall, but has been converted into domestic 
offices by the " restoration " of our own. Even Mr. 
Blore might have spared the cloisters from whose gal- 
lery, on the side toward the Thames, Elizabeth looked 
down on the gay line of nobles and courtiers who lean- 
ed from the barred windows beneath, and on the crowd 
of meaner subjects who filled the court, while she list- 
ened to Dr. Pearce as he preached from a pulpit set by 
the well in the midst. At its close, the queen passed to 
dinner in the archbishop's chamber of presence, while 
the noble throng beneath followed Burleigh and Lord 
Howard to the hall whose oaken roof told freshly of 
Parker's hand. At four the short visit was over, and 
Elizabeth again on her way to Greenwich. But, short 
as it was, it marked the conclusion of a new alliance 
between Church and State out of which the Ecclesias- 
tical Commission was to spring. 

Such an alliance would have been deadly for En- 
glish religion as for English liberty, had not its strength 
been broken by the obstinate resistance in wise, as 
well as unwise, ways of the Puritan party. There are 
few more interesting memorials of the struggle which 
followed than the "Martin Mar- Prelate" tracts which 
still remain in the collection at Lambeth, significantly 
scored in all their more virulent passages by the red 
pencil of Archbishop Whirgift. But the story of that 
controversy can not be told here, though it was at Lam- 
beth, as the seat of the High Commission, that it was 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 127 

really fought out. More and more it parted all who 
clung to liberty from the Church, and knit the episco- 
pate in a closer alliance with the crown. When Eliza- 
beth set Parker at the head of the new Ecclesiastical 
Commission, half the work of the Eeformation was, in 
fact, undone. 

Under Laud this great engine of ecclesiastical tyran- 
ny was perverted to the uses of civil tyranny of the 
vilest kind. Under Laud the clerical invectives of a 
Martin Mar -Prelate deepened into the national fury 
of " Canterburie's Doom." With this political aspect 
of his life we have not now to deal. What Lambeth 
Chapel brings out with singular vividness is the strange 
audacity with which the archbishop threw himself across 
the strongest religious sentiments of his time. Men 
noted as a fatal omen the accident that marked his first 
entry into Lambeth; the overladen ferry-boat upset in 
the crossing; and though horses and servants were 
saved, the primate's coach remained at the bottom of 
the Thames. But no omen brought hesitation to that 
bold, narrow mind. His first action, he tells us himself, 
was the restoration of the chapel, and, as Laud managed 
it, restoration was the simple undoing of all that the 
Reformation had done. 

" I found the windows so broken, and the chapel lay 
so nastily," he wrote long after, in his Defense, " that I 
was ashamed to behold, and could not resort unto it but 



128 STRAY STUDIES. 

with some disdain." With characteristic energy, the 
archbishop aided with his own hands in the repair of 
the windows, and racked his wits " in making up the 
history of those old broken pictures by help of the frag- 
ments of them, which I compared with the story." In 
the east window his glazier was scandalized at being 
forced by the primate's express directions to " repair and 
new-make the broken crucifix." The holy table was set 
altar -wise against the wall, and a cloth of arras hung 
behind it, embroidered with the history of the Last Sup- 
per. The elaborate wood-work of the screen, the rich- 
ly embroidered copes of the chaplains, the silver candle- 
sticks, the credence-table, the organ and the choir, the 
genuflexions to the altar, recalled the elaborate ceremo- 
nial of the Royal Chapel. 

High-handed, however, as the archbishop's course 
had been, he felt dimly the approaching wreck. At 
the close of 1639 he notes in his diary a great storm 
that broke even the boats of the Lambeth watermen to 
pieces as they lay before his gate. A curious instance 
of his gloomy prognostications still exists among the 
relics in the library — a quarry of greenish glass, once 
belonging to the west window of the gallery of Croy- 
don, and removed when that palace was rebuilt. On 
the quarry Laud has written with his signet-ring, in his 
own clear, beautiful hand, " Memorand. Ecclesiae de 
Micham, Cheme, et Stone cum aliis fulgure combustas 
sunt. Januar. 14, 163S-9. Omen avertat Deus." 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 129 

The omen was far from averted. The Scottish war — 
the Bellum Episcopale, the Bishops' War, as men called 
it — was soon going against the king. Land had been 
the chief mover in the war, and it was against Laud 
that the popular indignation at once directed itself. 
On the 9th of May he notes in his diary, "A paper post- 
ed upon the Royal Exchange, animating 'prentices to 
sack my house on the Monday following." On that 
Monday night the mob came surging up to the gates. 
"At midnight my house was beset with five hundred of 
these rascal routers," notes the indomitable little prel- 
ate, lie had received notice in time to secure the 
house, and after two hours of useless shouting the mob 
rolled away. Laud had his revenue: a drummer who 
had joined in the attack was racked mercilessly, and 
then hanged and quartered. But retaliation like this 
was useless. The gathering of the Long Parliament 
sounded the knell of the sturdy little minister who had 
ridden England so hard. At the close of October he is 
in his upper study — it is one of the pleasant scholarly 
touches that redeem so much in his life — "to see some 
manuscripts which I was sending to Oxford. In that 
study hung my picture taken by the life" (the picture 
is at Lambeth still), "and, coming in, I found it fallen 
down upon the face and lying on the floor, the string 
being broken by which it was hanged against the wall. 
I am almost every day threatened with my ruin in Par- 
liament. God grant this be no omen." On the 18th of 
December he was in charge of the gentleman-usher of 



130 STRAY STUDIES. 

the Lords on impeachment of high treason. In his com- 
pany, the archbishop returned for a few hours to see his 
house for the last time, "for a book or two to read in, 
and such papers as pertained to my defense against the 
Scots ;" really to burn, says Prynne, most of his privy 
papers. There is the first little break in the boldness 
with which till now he has faced the popular ill-will, 
the first little break, too, of tenderness, as though the 
shadow of what was to come were softening him, in the 
words that tell us his last farewell : " I staid at Lam- 
beth till the evening, to avoid the gaze of the people. 
I went to evening prayer in my chapel. The Psalms 
of the day (Ps. xciii. and xciv.) and chap. 1. of Isaiah 
gave me great comfort. God make me worthy of it, 
and fit to receive it. As I went to my barge, hundreds 
of my poor neighbors stood there and prayed for my 
safety and return to my house. For which I bless God 
and them." 

So Laud vanished into the dark December night, 
never to return. The house seems to have been left 
unmolested for two years. Then "Captain Browne 
and his company entered my house at Lambeth to keep 
it for public service." The troopers burst open the 
door " and offered violence to the organ," but it was 
saved for the time by the intervention of their captain. 
In 1643 the zeal of the soldiers could no longer be 
restrained. Even in the solitude and terror of his 
prison in the Tower, Laud still feels the bitterness of 



LAMBETH AND THE AKCHBISHOPS. 131 

the last blow at the house he held so dear. " May 1. 
My chapel windows defaced and the steps torn up." 
But the crowning bitterness was to come. If there 
were two men living who had personal wrongs to 
avenge on the archbishop, they were Leighton and 
Prynne. It can only have been as a personal triumph 
over their humbled persecutor that the Parliament ap- 
pointed the first custodian of Lambeth, and gave 
Prynne the charge of searching the archbishop's house 
and chambers for materials in support of the impeach- 
ment. Of the spirit in which Prynne executed his 
task, the famous " Canterburie's Doom," with the bre- 
viate of Laud's life which preceded it, still gives pungent 
evidence. By one of those curious coincidences that 
sometimes flash the fact upon us through the dust of 
old libraries, the copy of this violent invective preserved 
at Lambeth is inscribed on its fly-leaf with the clear, 
bold " Dura spiro spero, C. R." of the king himself. It 
is hard to picture the thoughts that must have passed 
through Charles's mind as he read the bitter, triumph- 
ant pages that told how the man he had twice pilloried 
and then flung into prison for life had come out again, 
as he puts it brutally, to " unkennel that fox," his foe. 

Not even the archbishop's study, with its array of 
missals and breviaries and books of hours; not even 
the gallery, with its u superstitious pictures," the three 
Italian masterpieces that he hurried as evidence to the 
bar of the House of Lords — so revealed to this terrible 



132 STRAY STUDIES. 

detective " the rotten, idolatrous heart " of the primate 
as the sight of the chapel. It was soon reduced to sim- 
plicity. We have seen how sharply, even in prison, 
Laud felt the havoc made by the soldiery. But worse 
profanation w T as to follows In 1648, the house passed 
by sale to the regicide Colonel Scott; the Great Hall 
was at once demolished, and the chapel turned into the 
dining-room of the household. The tomb of Parker 
was leveled with the ground ; and, if we are to believe 
the story of the royalists, the new owner felt so keen- 
ly the discomfort of dining over a dead man's bones 
that the remains of the great Protestant primate were 
disinterred and buried anew in an adjoining field. 

The story of the library is a more certain one. From 
the days of Bancroft to those of Laud it had remained 
secure in the rooms over the great cloister where Par- 
ker's collection had probably stood before it passed to 
Cambridge. There, in Parker's day, Foxe had busied 
himself in w T ork for the later editions of his "Acts and 
Monuments;" even in the present library one book at 
least bears his autograph and the marginal marks of 
his use. There the great scholars of the seventeenth 
century, with Selden among them, had carried on their 
labors. The time w T as now come when Selden was to 
save the library from destruction. At the sale of Lam- 
beth the Parliament ordered the books and manuscripts 
to be sold with the house. Selden dexterously inter- 
posed. The will of its founder, Bancroft, he pleaded, 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 133 

directed that, in case room should not be found for it 
at Lambeth, his gift should go to Cambridge ; and the 
Parliament, convinced by its greatest scholar, suffered 
the books to be sent to the university. 

When the Eestoration brought the Stuart home again, 
it flung Scott into the Tower, and set Juxon in the ruin- 
ed, desecrated walls. Of the deeper thoughts that such 
a scene might have suggested, few probably found their 
way into the simple, limited mind of the new primate. 
The whole pathos of Juxon's position lay, in fact, in his 
perfect absorption in the past. The books were re- 
claimed from their Cambridge Adullam. The chapel 
was rescued from desecration, and the fine wood-work 
of screen and stalls replaced as Laud had left them. 
The demolition of the hall left him a more serious 
labor, and the way in which he entered on it brought 
strikingly out Juxon's temper. He knew that he had 
but a few years to live, and he set himself but one work 
to do before he died — the replacing every thing in the 
state in which the storm of the rebellion had found it. 
He resolved, therefore, not only to rebuild the hall, but 
to rebuild it precisely as it had stood before it was 
destroyed. It was in vain that lie was besieged by 
the remonstrances of " classical " architects, that he was 
sneered at even by Pepys as "old-fashioned." Times 
had changed and fashions had changed ; but Juxon 
would recognize no change at all. He died ere the 
building was finished; but even in death his inflexible 



134 STKAY STUDIES. 

will provided that his plans should be adhered to. The 
result has been a singularly happy one. It was not 
merely that the archbishop has left us one of the no- 
blest examples of that strange yet successful revival 
of Gothic feeling of which the staircase of Christ 
Church Hall, erected at much about the same time, 
furnishes so exquisite a specimen. It is that in his 
tenacity to the past he has preserved the historic in- 
terest of his hall. Beneath the picturesque wood-work 
of the roof, in the quiet light that breaks through the 
quaint mullions of its windows, the student may still 
recall without a jar the figures which make Lambeth 
memorable, figures such as those of Warham and Eras- 
mus, of Grocyn and Colet and More. Unhappily there 
was a darker side to this conservatism. The archbish- 
ops had returned, like the Bourbons, forgetting nothing 
and having learned hardly any thing. If any man 
could have learned the lesson of history, it was Juxon's 
successor, the hard, skeptical Sheldon ; and one of the 
jottings in Pepys's Diary shows us what sort of lesson 
he had learned. Pepys had gone down the river at 
noon to dine with the archbishop, in company with Sir 
Christopher Wren, "the first time," as he notes, "that 
I ever was there, and I have longed for it." Only a few 
days before he had had a terrible disappointment, for 
" Mr. Wren and I took boat, thinking to dine with my 
lord of Canterbury ; but when we came to Lambeth the 
gate was shut, which is strictly done at twelve o'clock, 
and nobody comes in afterward, so we lost our labor." 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 135 

On this occasion Pepys was more fortunate. He 
found "a noble house and well furnished with good 
pictures and furniture, and noble attendance in good 
order, and a great deal of company, though an ordinary 
day, and exceeding good cheer, nowhere better or so 
much that ever I think I saw." Sheldon, with his usu- 
al courtesy, gave his visitors kindly welcome, and Pepys 
was preparing to withdraw at the close of dinner when 
he heard news which induced him to remain. The al- 
most incredible scene that followed must be told in his 
own words : " Most of the company gone, and I going, 
I heard by a gentleman of a sermon that was to be 
there ; and so I staid to hear it, thinking it to be seri- 
ous, till by-and-by the gentleman told me it was a mock- 
ery by one Cornet Bolton, a very gentleman-like man, 
that behind a chair did pray and preach like a Presby- 
ter Scot, with all the possible imitation in grimaces and 
voice. And his text about the hanging up their harps 
upon the willows; and a serious, good sermon too, ex- 
claiming against bishops, and crying up of my good 
Lord Eglington till it made us all burst. But I did 
wonder to hear the bishop at this time to make him- 
self sport with things of this kind ; but I perceive it 
was shown to him as a rarity, and he took care to have 
the room-door shut; but there were about twenty gen- 
tlemen there, infinitely pleased with the ' novelty.' " 

It was " novelties " like these that led the last of the 
Stuarts to his fatal belief that he could safely defy a 



136 STRAY STUDIES. 

Church that had so severed itself from the English re- 
ligion in doing the work of the crown. The pen of a 
great historian has told for all time the Trial of the 
Seven Bishops ; and though their protest was drawn up 
at Lambeth, I may not venture to tell it here. Of all 
the seven, in fact, Sancroft was probably the least in- 
clined to resistance, the one prelate to whom the cheers 
of the great multitude at their acquittal brought least 
sense of triumph. 

No sooner, indeed, was James driven from the throne 
than the primate fell back into the servile king -wor- 
ship of an England that was passing away. Within the 
closed gates of Lambeth he debated endlessly with him- 
self and with his fellow-bishops the questions of "de 
jure" and "de facto" right to the crown. Every day 
he sheered farther and farther from the actual world 
around him. Newton, who was with him at Lambeth 
when it was announced that the convention had de- 
clared the throne vacant, found that Sancroft's thoughts 
were not with England or English freedom — they were 
concentrated on the question whether James's child 
were a supposititious one or no. " He wished," he said, 
" they had gone on a more regular method, and exam- 
ined into the birth of the young child. There was rea- 
son," lie added, " to believe he was not the same as the 
^first, which might easily be known, for he had a mole 
on his neck." The new Government bore long with the 
old man, and Sancroft for a time seems really to have 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 137 

wavered. He suffered his chaplains to take the oaths, 
and then scolded them bitterly for praying for William 
and Mary. He declined to take his seat at the council- 
board, and yet issued his commission for the consecra- 
tion of Burnet. At last his mind was made up, and 
the Government, on his final refusal to take the oath of 
allegiance, had no alternative but to declare the see 
vacant. 

For six months Sancroft w T as still suffered to remain 
in his house, though Tillotson was nominated as his suc- 
cessor. With a perfect courtesy, worthy of the saintly 
temper which was his characteristic, Tillotson waited 
long at the deprived archbishop's door, desiring a con- 
ference. But Sancroft refused to see him. Evelyn 
found the old man in a dismantled house, bitter at his 
fall. " Say c nolo,' and say it from the heart," he had 
replied passionately to Beveridge when he sought his 
counsel on the offer of a bishopric. Others asked 
whether after refusing the oaths they might attend wor- 
ship where the new sovereigns were prayed for. " If 
they do," answered Sancroft, " they will need the Abso- 
lution at the end as well as at the beginning of the 
service." In the answer lay the schism of the Non- 
jurors, and to this schism Sancroft soon gave definite 
form. On Whitsunday the new Church was started in 
the archiepiscopal chapel. The throng of visitors was 
kept standing at the palace gate. No one was admitted 
to the chapel but some fifty who had refused the oaths. 



138 STRAY STUDIES. 

The archbishop himself consecrated: one Non- juror 
reading the prayers, another preaching. A formal ac- 
tion of ejectment was the answer to this open defiance, 
and, on the evening of its decision in favor of the 
crown, Sancroft withdrew quietly, by boat over Thames, 
to the Temple. He was soon followed by many who, 
amidst the pettiness of his public views, could still real- 
ize the grandeur of his self-devotion. To one, the Earl 
of Aylesbury, the archbishop himself opened the door. 
His visitor, struck with the change of all he saw from 
the pomp of Lambeth, burst into tears and owned how 
deeply the sight affected him. " Oh, my good lord !" 
replied Sancroft, " rather rejoice with me, for now I live 



With Sancroft's departure opens a new age of Lam- 
beth's ecclesiastical history. The Revolution which 
flung him aside had completed the work of the great 
Rebellion in sweeping away forever the old pretensions 
of the primates to an autocracy within the Church of 
England. But it seemed to have opened a nobler pros- 
pect in placing them at the head of the Protestant 
churches of the world. In their common peril before 
the great Catholic aggression, which found equal sup- 
port at Paris and Vienna, the Reformed communities 
of the Continent looked for aid and sympathy to the 
one Reformed Church whose position was now unassail- 
able. The congregations of the Palatinate appealed to 
Lambeth when they were trodden under-foot beneath 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 139 

the horse - hoof s of Turenne. The same appeal came 
from the Vaudois refugees in Germany, the Silesian 
Protestants, the Huguenot churches that still fought 
for existence in France, the Calvinists of Geneva, the 
French refugees who had forsaken their sunny homes 
in the South for the Gospel and God. In the dry letter- 
books on the Lambeth shelves, in the records of bounty 
dispensed through the archbishop to the persecuted and 
the stranger, in the warm and cordial correspondence 
with Lutheran and Calvinist, survives a faint memory 
of the golden visions which filled Protestant hearts after 
the accession of the great deliverer. " The eyes of the 
world are upon us," was Tenison's plea for union with 
Protestants at home. "All the Reformed churches are 
in expectation of something to be done which may 
make for union and peace." When a temper so cold as 
Tenison's could kindle in this fashion, it is no wonder 
that more enthusiastic minds launched into loftier ex- 
pectations — that Leibnitz hoped to see the union of Cal- 
vinist and Lutheran accomplished by a common adop- 
tion of the English Liturgy, that a High -Churchman 
like Nicholls revived the plan, which Cranmer had pro- 
posed and Calvin had supported, of a general council of 
Protestants to be held in England. One by one, such 
visions faded before the virulence of party spirit, the 
narrowness and timidity of Churchmen, the base and 
selfish politics of the time. Few men had higher or 
more spiritual conceptions of Christian unity than Ten- 
ison ; yet the German translation of our Liturgy, stamp- 



140 STRAY STUDIES. 

ed with the royal monogram of King Frederick, which 
still exists in the library, reminds us how, in mere jeal- 
ousy of a Tory triumph, Tenison flung away the offer 
of a union with the Church of Prussia. The creeping 
ambition of Dubois foiled whatever dreams Archbishop 
Wake may have entertained of a union with the Church 
of France. 

From the larger field of political and ecclesiastical 
history w T e may turn again, ere we close to the narrower 
limits of the Lambeth Library. The storm which drove 
Sancroft from his house left his librarian, Henry Whar- 
ton, still bound to the books he loved so well. Wharton 
is one of those instances of precocious development 
which are rarer in the sober walks of historical investi- 
gation than in art. It is a strange young face that we 
see in the frontispiece to his sermons, the impression of 
its broad, high brow and prominent nose, so oddly in 
contrast with the delicate, feminine curves of the mouth, 
and yet repeated in the hard, concentrated gaze of the 
large, full eyes which look out from under the enor- 
mous wig. Wharton was the most accomplished of 
Cambridge students when he quitted the University at 
twenty -two to aid Cave in his "Historia Litteraria." 
But the time proved too exciting for a purely litera- 
ry career. At Tenison's instigation the young scholar 
plunged into the thick of the controversy which had 
been provoked by the aggression of King James, and 
his vigor soon attracted the notice of Sancroft. He be- 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 141 

came one of the archbishop's chaplains, and was pre- 
sented in a single year to two of the best livings in his 
gift. With these, however, save in his very natural zeal 
for pluralities, he seems to have concerned himself lit- 
tle. It was with the library which now passed into his 
charge that his name was destined to be associated. 
Under him its treasures were thrown liberally open to 
the ecclesiastical antiquaries of his day : to Hody, to 
Stillingfleet, to Collier, to Atterbury, and to Strype, who 
was just beginning his voluminous collections toward 
the illustration of the history of the sixteenth century. 
But no one made so much use of the documents in his 
charge as Wharton himself. In them, no doubt, lay 
the secret of his consent to take the oath, to separate 
from his earlier patron, to accept the patronage of Teni- 
son. But there was no permanent breach with San- 
croft. On his death- bed the archbishop committed to 
him the charge of editing Laud's papers, a charge re- 
deemed by his publication of the " Troubles and Trials " 
of the archbishop in 1694. 

But this, with other labors, was mere by-play. The 
design upon which his energies were mainly concen- 
trated was " to exhibit a complete ecclesiastical history 
of England to the Beformation," and the two volumes 
of the "Anglia Sacra," which appeared during his life, 
were intended as a partial fulfillment of this design. 
Of these, as they now stand, the second is by far the 
more valuable. The four archiepiscopal biographies by 



142 STRAY STUDIES. 

Osbern, the three by Eadmer, Malmesbury's lives of Aid- 
helm and Wulstan, the larger collection of works by 
Giraldus Cambrensis, Chaundler's biographies of Wyke- 
ham and Bekington, and the collection of smaller docu- 
ments which accompanied these, formed a more valua- 
ble contribution to our ecclesiastical history than had, 
up to Wharton's time, ever been made. The first vol- 
ume contained the chief monastic annals which illus- 
trated the history of the sees whose cathedrals were pos- 
sessed by monks ; those served by canons, regular or sec- 
ular, were reserved for a third volume; while a fourth 
was to have contained the episcopal annals of the 
Church from the Reformation to the Re volution. 

The last, however, was never destined to appear, and 
its predecessor was interrupted, after the completion of 
the histories of London and St. Asaph, by the premature 
death of the great scholar. In 1694, Battely writes a 
touching account to Strype of his interview with Whar- 
ton at Canterbury : " One day he opened his trunk and 
drawers, and showed me his great collections concern- 
ing the state of our Church, and, with a great sigh, told 
me his labors were at an end, and that his strength 
would not permit him to finish any more of that sub- 
ject." Vigorous and healthy as his natural constitution 
was, he had worn it out with the severity of his toil. 
He denied himself refreshment in his eagerness for 
study, and sat over his books in the bitterest days of 
winter till hands and feet were powerless with the cold. 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 143 

At last nature abruptly gave way, his last hopes of re- 
covery were foiled by an immoderate return to his old 
pursuits, and at the age of thirty-one Henry Wharton 
died a quiet scholar's death. Archbishop Tenison stood 
with Bishop Lloyd by the grave in Westminster, where 
the body was laid " with solemn and devout anthems 
composed by that most ingenious artist, Mr. Harry Pur- 
cell ;" and over it were graven words that tell the bro- 
ken story of so many a student life : " Multa ad augen- 
dam et illustrandam rem literariam conscripsit; plura 
moliebatur." 

The library no longer rests in those quiet rooms over 
the great cloister in which a succession of librarians, 
such as Gibson, and Wilkins, and Ducarel, preserved 
the tradition of Henry Wharton. The " Codex " of the 
first, the " Concilia " of the second, and the elaborate 
analysis of the Canterbury Registers which we owe to 
the third, are, like Wharton's own works, of primary 
importance to the study of English ecclesiastical his- 
tory. It was reserved for our own day to see these 
memories swept away by the degradation of the cloister 
into a kitchen yard and a scullery. But the Great Hall 
of Archbishop Juxon, to which, by a happy fortune, the 
books were transferred, lias seen in Dr. Maitland and 
Professor Stubbs keepers whose learning more than 
rivals the learning of Wharton himself. It is not with- 
out significance that this great library still lies open to 
the public as a part, and a notable part, of the palace 



144: STRAY STUDIES. 

of the chief prelate of the English Church. Even if 
Philistines abound in it, the spirit and drift of the En- 
glish Church have never been wholly Philistine. It 
has managed somehow to reflect and represent the 
varying phases of English life and English thought; 
it has developed more and more a certain original 
largeness and good-tempered breadth of view; amidst 
the hundred jarring theories of itself and its position 
which it has embraced at one time or another, it has 
never stooped to the mere " pay over the counter " theo- 
ry of Little Bethel. Above all, it has as yet managed 
to find room for almost every shade of religious opinion, 
and it has answered at once to every national revival 
of taste, of beauty, and of art. 

Great as are the faults of the Church of England, 
these are merits which make men who care more for 
the diffusion of culture than for the propagation of 
this shade or that shade of religious opinion shrink 
from any immediate wish for her fall. And they are 
merits which spring from this, that she is still a learn- 
ed Church — not learned in the sense of purely theolog- 
ical or ecclesiastical learning — but a Church which is 
able to show among its clergy men of renown in every 
branch of literature — critical, poetical, historical, or 
scientific. How long this distinction is to continue her 
own, it is hard to say ; there are signs, indeed, in the 
theological temper which is creeping over the clergy 
that it is soon to cease. But the spirit of intelligence, 



LAMBETH AND THE ARCHBISHOPS. 145 

of largeness of view, of judicious moderation, which is 
so alien from the theological spirit, can still look for 
support from the memories of Lambeth. Whatever 
its influence may have been, it has not grown out of 
the noisy activity of theological "movement," Its 
strength has been to sit still and let such " movements " 
pass by. It is by a spirit the very opposite of theirs — 
a spirit of conciliation, of largeness of heart — that it has 
won its power over the Church. 

None of the great theological impulses of this age 
or the last, it is sometimes urged, came out of Lam- 
beth. Little of the theological bitterness, of the contro- 
versial narrowness of this age or the last, it may fairly 
be answered, has ever entered its gates. Of Lambeth 
we may say what Matthew Arnold says of Oxford, that 
many as are its faults, it has never surrendered itself 
to ecclesiastical Philistines. In the calm, genial silence 
of its courts, its library, its galleries, in the presence 
of its venerable past, the virulence, the petty strife, 
the tumult of religious fanaticism finds itself hushed. 
Among the storms of the Wesleyan revival, of the 
Evangelical revival, of the Puseyite revival, the voice 
of Lambeth has ever pleaded for a truth simpler, larger, 
more human than theirs. Amidst the deafening clamor 
of Tractarian and anti-Tractarian disputants, both sides 
united in condemning the silence of Lambeth. Yet 
the one word that came from Lambeth will still speak 
to men's hearts when all their noisy disputations are 

IP 



l±Q STRAY STUDIES. 

forgotten. "How," a prelate, whose nearest relative 
had joined the Church of Rome, asked Archbishop 
Howley, " how shall I treat my brother P "As a broth- 
er," was the archbishop's reply. 



CHILDREN BY THE SEA, 



CHILDREN BY THE SEA. 



Autumn brings its congresses — scientific, ecclesiastic- 
al, archaeological — but the prettiest of autumnal con- 
gresses is the children's congress by the sea. It is like 
a leap from prose into poetry when we step away from 
associations and institutes, from stuffy lecture-rooms and 
dismal sections, to the strip of sand which the children 
have chosen for their annual gathering. Behind us are 
the great white cliffs ; before us the reach of gray wa- 
ters, with steamers and their smoke-trail in the offing, 
and waves washing lazily in upon the shore: and be- 
tween sea and cliff are a world of little creatures, dig- 
ging, dabbling, delighted. What strikes us at first sight 
is the number of them. In ordinary life we meet the 
great host of children in detail, as it were ; we kiss our 
little ones in the morning, we tumble over a perambula- 
tor, we dodge a hoop, we pat back a ball. Child after 
child meets us, but w r e never realize the world of chil- 
dren till we see it massed upon the sands. Children of 
every age, from the baby to the school-boy ; big children 
and tiny children; weak little urchins w r ith pale cheeks, 
and plump little urchins with sturdy legs; children of 



150 STRAY STUDIES. 

all tempers, from the screeching child in arms to the 
quiet child sitting placid and gazing out of large gray 
eyes ; gay little madcaps paddling at the water's edge ; 
busy children, idle children, children careful of their 
dress, hoydens covered with sand and sea -weed, wild 
children, demure children — all are mustered in the 
great many-colored camp between the cliffs and the sea. 

It is their holiday as it is ours ; but what is a mere 
refreshment to us is life to them. What a rapture of 
freedom looks up at us out of the little faces that watch 
us, as we thread our way from group to group ! The 
mere change of dress is a revolution in the child's exist- 
ence. These brown -holland frocks, rough sunshades, 
and sand -boots; these clothes that they may wet and 
dirty and tear as they like, mean deliverance from end- 
less dressings — dressings for breakfast and dressings for 
lunch, dressings to go out with mamma, and dressings to 
come down to dessert — an escape from fashipnable little 
shoes, and tight little hats, and stiff little flounces, that 
it is treason to rumple. There is an inexpressible tri- 
umph in their return at even-tide from the congress by 
the sea, disheveled, bedraggled, but with no fear of a 
scolding from nurse. Then, too, there is the freedom 
from " lessons." There are no more of those dreadful 
maps along the wall, no French exercises, no terrible 
arithmetic. The elder girls make a faint show of keep- 
ing up their practicing, but the goody books which the 
governess packed carefully at the bottom of their boxes 



CHILDREN" BY THE SEA. 151 

remain at the bottom unopened. There is no time for 
books, the grave little faces protest to you : there is only 
time for the sea. That is why they hurry over break- 
fast to get early to the sands, and are moody and rest- 
less at the length of luncheon. It is a hopeless business 
to keep them at home ; they yawn over picture-books, 
they quarrel over croquet, they fall asleep over draughts. 
Home is just now only an interlude of sleeping or din- 
ing, in the serious business of the day. 

The one interest of existence is in the sea. Its novel- 
ty, its vastness, its life, dwarf every thing else in the lit- 
tle minds beside it. There is the endless watching for 
the ships ; the first peep at the little dot on the horizon ; 
the controversies, as it rises, about its masts or its flag ; 
the questions as to where it is coming from and where 
it is going to. There is the endless speculation on the 
tide ; the doubt every morning whether it is coming in 
or going out; the wonder of its perpetual advance or 
retreat ; the whispered tales of children hemmed in be- 
tween it and the cliffs ; the sense of a mysterious life ; 
the sense of a mysterious danger. Above all, there is 
the sense of a mysterious power. The children wake as 
the wind howls in the night, or the rain dashes against 
the window panes, to tell each other how the waves are 
leaping high over the pier, and ships tearing to pieces 
on reefs far away. So charming and yet so terrible, the 
most playful of playfellows, the most awful of possible 
destroyers, the child's first consciousness of the greatness 



152 STKAY STUDIES. 

and mystery of the world around him is embodied in 
the sea. 

It is amusing to see the precision with which the 
children's congress breaks up into its various sections. 
The most popular and important is that of the engi- 
neers. The little members come toddling down from 
the cliffs with a load of implements, shouldering rake 
and spade, and dangling tiny buckets from their arms. 
One little group makes straight for its sand-hole of yes- 
terday, and is soon busy with huge heaps and mounds 
which are to take the form of a castle. A crowing lit- 
tle urchin beside is already waving the union-jack which 
is ready to crown the edifice, if the Fates ever suffer it 
to be crowned. Engineers of less military taste are 
busy near the water's edge with an elaborate system of 
reservoirs and canals, and greeting with shouts of tri- 
umph the admission of the water to miniature little 
harbors. A corps of absolutely unscientific laborers are 
simply engaged in digging the deepest hole they can, 
and the blue nets over their sunshades are alone visible 
above the edge of the excavation. It is delightful to 
watch the industry, the energy, the absolute seriousness 
and conviction of the engineers. Sentries warn you off 
from the limits of the fortress; you are politely asked 
to " please take care," as your clumsy foot strays along 
the delicate brink of the canal. Suggestions that have 
a mechanical turn about them, hints on the best way of 
reaching the water, or the possibility of a steeper slope 



CHILDREN BY THE SEA. 153 

for the sand -walls, are listened to with attention and 
respect. You are rewarded by an invitation which al- 
lows you to witness the very moment when the dike is 
broken, and the sea admitted into basin and canal, or 
the yet more ecstatic moment when the union -jack 
waves over the completed castle. 

Indolence and adventure charm the dabblers, as 
industry absorbs the engineers. The sands are, of all 
earthly spots, the most delightful ; but a greater delight 
than any earthly spot can afford awaits the dabbler in 
the sea. It is mostly the girls who dabble ; the gayety 
and frolic suit them better than the serious industry of 
castles and canals. Deliverance from shoes and stock- 
ings ; the first thrill of pleasure and surprise at the cool 
touch of the water ; the wild rush along the brim ; the 
dainty advance till the sea covers the little ankles ; the 
tremulous waiting with an air of defiance as the wave 
deepens round till it touches the knee; the firm line 
with which the dabblers grasp hand in hand and face 
the advancing tide; the sudden panic; the break; the 
disorderly flight ; the tears and laughter ; the run after 
the wave as it retreats again ; the fresh advance and de- 
fiance — this is the paradise of the dabbler. Hour after 
hour, with clothes tucked round their waists, and a lav- 
ish display of stout little legs, the urchins wage their 
mimic warfare with the sea. Meanwhile the scientific 
section is encamped upon the rocks. With torn vest- 
ments and bruised feet, the votaries of knowledge are 



154 STRAY STUDIES. 

peeping into every little pool, detecting mussel -shells, 
picking up sea- weed, hunting for anemones. A shout 
of triumph from the tiny adventurer who has climbed 
over the rough rock-shelf announces that he has secured 
a prize for the glass jar at home, where the lumps of 
formless jelly burst into rosy flowers, with delicate -ten- 
drils waving gently round them for food. A cry of woe 
tells of some infantile Whymper who has lost his hold 
on an Alpine rock-edge some six inches high. Knowl- 
edge has its difficulties as well as its dangers, and the 
difficulty of forming a rock-section in the face of the 
stern opposition of mothers and nurses is undoubtedly 
great. Still, formed it is, and science furnishes a good- 
ly company of votaries and martyrs to the congress by 
the sea. 

But, of course, the naval section bears away the palm. 
It is for the most part composed of the elder boys and 
of a few girls who would be boys if they could. Its 
members all possess a hopeless passion for the sea, and 
besiege their mothers for promises that their future life 
shall be that of middies. They wear straw hats and 
loose blue shirts, and affect as much of the sailor in 
their costume as they can. Each has a boat, or, as they 
call it, a " vessel," and the build and rig of these vessels 
is a subject of constant discussion and rivalry in the sec- 
tion. Much critical inquiry is directed to the propriety 
of Arthur's jib, or the necessity of " ballasting " or pour- 
ing a little molten lead into Edward's keel. The launch 



CHILDREN" BY THE SEA. 155 

of a new vessel is the event of the week. The coast- 
guardsman is brought in to settle knotty questions of 
naval architecture and equipment, and the little seamen 
listen to his verdicts, his yarns, the records of his voy- 
ages, with a wondering reverence. They ask knowing- 
ly about the wind and the prospects of the weather; 
they submit to his higher knowledge their theories as to 
the nature and destination of each vessel that passes ; 
they come home with a store of naval phrases which 
are poured recklessly out over the tea-table. The pier 
is a favorite haunt of the naval section. They delight 
in sitting on rough coils of old rope. Nothing that is 
of the sea comes amiss to them. " I like the smell of 
tar," shouts a little enthusiast. They tell tales among 
themselves of the life of a middie and the fan of the 
" fo-castle," and watch the waves leaping up over the 
pier-head with a w T ild longing to sing " Rule Britannia." 
Every ship in the offing is a living thing to them, and 
the appearance of a man-of-war sends them sleepless 
to bed. 

There is but one general meeting of the children's 
congress, and that is in front of the bathing-machines. 
Rows of little faces wait for their turn, watching the 
dash of the waves beneath the wheels, peeping at the 
black -robed figures who are bobbing up and down in 
the sea, half longing for their dip, half shrinking as the 
inevitable moment comes nearer and nearer, dashing 
forward joyously at last as the door opens and the bath- 



156 STRAY STUDIES. 

ing woman's "Now, my dear," summons them to the 
quaint little box. One lingers over the sight as one lin- 
gers over a bed of flowers. There is all the fragrance, 
the color, the sweet caprice, the willfulness, the delight 
of childhood, in the tiny figures that meet us on the 
return from their bath, with dancing eyes and flushed 
cheeks, and hair streaming over their shoulders. What 
a hero the group finds in the urchin who never cries ! 
With what envy they regard the big sister who never 
wants to come out of the water ! It is pleasant to listen 
to their prattle as they stroll over the sands with a fresh 
life running through every vein, to hear their confession 
of fright at the first dip, their dislike of putting their 
head under water, their chaff of the delicate little sister 
who " will only bathe with mamma." Mammas are al- 
ways good-humored by the sea ; papas come out of their 
eternal newspaper and toss the wee brats on their shoul- 
ders ; uncles drop down on the merry little group with 
fresh presents every day. The restraint, the distance of 
home vanishes with the practical abolition of the nurs- 
ery and the school-room. Home, school -room, nursery, 
all are crammed together in the little cockle-shell of a 
boat, where the little ones are packed round father and 
mother and tossing gayly over the waves. What end- 
less fun in the rising and falling, the creaking of the 
sail, the gruff voice of the boatman, the sight of the dis- 
tant cliffs, the flock of sea-gulls nestling in the wave- 
hollows ! The little ones trail their hands in the cool 
water, and fancy they see mermaids in the cool green 



CHILDREN BY THE SEA. 157 

depths. The big boy watches the boatman and studies 
navigation. The little brother dips a hook now and 
then in a fond hope of whiting. The tide has come in 
ere they return, and the little voyagers are lifted out, 
tired and sleepy, in the boatman's arms, to dream that 
night of endless sailings over endless seas. 

It is a terrible morning that brings the children news 
of their recall to the smoke and din of town. They 
wander for a last visit down to the beach, listen for the 
last time to the young bandit in his Spanish sombrero 
who charms the nursery- maids with lays of love, club 
their pence for a last interview with the itinerant pho- 
tographer. It is all over ; the sands are thinner now ; 
group after group is breaking up, autumn is dying into 
winter, and rougher winds are blowing over the sea. 
But the sea is never too rough for the little ones. With 
hair blown wildly about their faces, they linger discon- 
solately along the brink, count the boats they shall nev- 
er see again, make pilgrimages to the rock caves to tell 
its separate story of enjoyment in each of them, and 
fling themselves with a last kiss on the dear, dear sands ! 
Then they shoulder their spade and rake, and, with one 
fond look at the cliffs, turn their backs on the sea. But 
the sea is with them still, even when the crowded train 
has whirled them far from waves that the white gull 
skims over. They have their tales of it to tell to their 
governess, their memories of it to count over before 
they fall asleep, their dreams of it as they lie asleep, 



158 STRAY STUDIES. 

their hopes of seeing it again when weary winter and 
spring and summer have at last slipped away. They 
listen to stories of wrecks, and find a half-penny for the 
sham sailor who trolls his ballads in the street. Now 
and then they look lovingly at the ships and the sand- 
buckets piled away in the play-cupboard. So, with one 
abiding thought at their little hearts, the long days glide 
away till autumn finds them again children by the sea. 



THE FLORENCE OF DANTE. 



THE FLORENCE OF DANTE 



The one story in the history of the modern world 
which rivals in concentrated interest the story of Athens 
is the story of Florence in the years just before and 
after the opening of the fourteenth century — the few 
years, that is, of its highest glory in freedom, in letters, 
in art. Never, since the days of Pericles, had such a 
varied outburst of human energy been summed up in 
so short a space. Architecture reared the noble monu- 
ments of the Duomo and Santa Croce. Cimabue revo- 
lutionized painting, and then " the cry was Giotto's." 
Italian poetry, preluded by the canzonets of Guido Ca- 
valcanti and his rivals, rose to its fullest grandeur in the 
"Commedia" of Dante. Italian prose was born in the 
works of Malaspina and Dino. Within, the Florentines 
worked out, patiently and bravely, amidst a thousand 
obstacles, the problem of free and popular government. 
Without, they covered sea and land with their com- 
merce; their agents supplied the papal treasury, while 
private firms were already beginning that career of vast 
foreign loans which at a later time enabled the victor of 
Crecy to equip his armies with Florentine gold. 

11 



162 STRAY STUDIES. 

We can only realize the attitude of Florence at tins 
moment by its contrast with the rest of Europe. It was 
a time when Germany was sinking down into feudal 
chaos under the earlier Hapsburgs. The system of des- 
potic centralization invented by St. Louis and perfected 
by Philippe le Bel w T as crushing freedom and vigor out 
of France." If Parliamentary life was opening in En- 
gland, literature was dead; and a feudalism which had 
become imbittered by the new forms of law which the 
legal spirit of the age gave it was pressing harder and 
harder on the peasantry. Even in Italy, Florence stood 
alone. The South lay crushed beneath the oppression 
of its French conquerors. In the North the earlier com- 
munal freedom had already made way for the rule of 
tyrants when it was just springing into life in the city 
by the Arno. For it is noteworthy that of all the cities 
of Italy Florence is the most modern. Genoa and Pisa 
had been rivals in commercial activity a hundred years 
before the merchants of Florence were known out of 
Tuscany. Sicily had caught the gift of song from the 
Provencal troubadours half a century before the Flor- 
entine singers. Too insignificant to share in the great 
struggle of the Empire and the Papacy, among the last 
to be divided into Guelph and Ghibelline, Florence 
emerged into communal greatness when that of Milan 
or Bologna was already in decay. 

The City of the Lily came late to the front to inherit 
and give fresh vigor to the gifts of all. As the effigies 



THE FLOREiN'CE OF DANTE. 163 

of Byzantine art became living men and women beneath 
the pencil of Giotto, .so the mere imitative poetry of the 
Sicilian court became Italian literature in Dante and 
Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, 
nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere fought so long 
and stubbornly for life. Dino Compagni set.- us face 
to face with this awakening, with this patient, pitiful 
struggle. His "Chronicle," indeed, has been roughly 
attacked of late by the sweeping skepticism of German 
critics, but the attack has proved an unsuccessful one. 
The strongest evidence of its genuineness, indeed, lies in 
the impression of a distinct personality which i^ left on 
us by a simple perusal of the i; Chronicle" itself. Some 
of its charm no doubt rises from the naive simplicity of 
Dino's story-telling. With him and with his contempo- 
raries, Malaspina, Dante, and Yillani, Italian prose be- 
gins; and we can hardly fancv a better training in 
style for any young Italian than to be brought face to 
face in Dino with the nervous, picturesque accents that 
marked the birth of his mother-tongue. But the charm 
is more one of character than one of style. Throughout 
we feel the man, a man whose temper is so strongly and 
clearly marked in its contrast with so reflective a tem- 
per as Villains, that the German theory which makes 
his chronicle a mere cento from the later work hardly 
needs discussion. Dino has the quaint directness, the 
dramatic force, the tenderness of Froissart, but it is a 
nobler and more human tenderness; a pity not for the 
knight only, but for knight and burgher as well. The 



164: STRAY STUDIES. 

sham tinsel of chivalry which flutters over the pages of 
the gay Canon of Liege is exchanged in Dino for a 
manly patriotism, a love of civic freedom, of justice, of 
religion. In his quiet way he is a great artist. There 
is an Herodotean picturesqueness as well as an Herodo- 
tean simplicity in such a picture as that of Dante's first 
battle-field, the Florentine victory of Campaldino : 

" On the appointed day the men of Florence advanced 
their standards to go into the enemies' land, and passed 
by Casentino along an ill road where, had the enemy 
found them, they had received no little damage ; but 
such was not the will of God. And they came near to 
Bibbiena, at a place called Campaldino, where was the 
enemy, and there they halted in array of battle. The 
captains of war sent the light-armed foot to the front ; 
and each man's shield, with a red lily on a white ground, 
was stretched out well before him. Then the bishop, 
who was short-sighted, asked, ' Those there : what walls 
be they?' They answered him, 'The shields of the 
enemy.' Messer Barone de' Mangiadori da San Minia- 
to, a chevalier frank and well skilled in deeds of arms, 
gathered his men-at-arms together, and said to them, 
' My masters, in Tuscan wars men were wont to conquer 
by making a stout onset, and that lasted but a while, 
and few men died, for it was not in use to kill. Now 
is the fashion changed, and men conquer by holding 
their ground stoutly, wherefore I counsel you that ye 
stand firm and let them assault you.' And so they set- 



THE FLORENCE OF DANTE. 165 

tied to do. The men of Arezzo made their onset with 
such vigor and so great force that the body of the Flor- 
entines fell back not a little. The fight was hard and 
keen. Messer Corso Donati, with a brigade of the men 
of Pistoja, charged the enemy in flank; the quarrels 
from the cross-bows poured down like rain ; the men of 
Arezzo had few of them, and were withal charged in 
flank, where they were exposed ; the air was covered 
with clouds, and there was a very great dust. Then 
the footmen of Arezzo set themselves to creep under 
the bellies of the horses, knife in hand, and disembow- 
eled them ; and some of them penetrated so far that 
in the very midst of the battalion were many dead of 
either part. Many that were counted of great prowess 
were shown vile that day, and many of whom noue 
spoke word won honor. . . . The men of Arezzo were 
broken, not by cowardice or little prowess, but by the 
greater number of their enemies were they put to the 
rout and slain. The soldiers of Florence, that were 
used to fighting, slew them ; the villeins had no pity." 

"Pity" is almost the characteristic word of Dino 
Compagni — pity alike for foe or friend; for the war- 
riors of Arezzo or the starved -out patriots of Fistoja, 
as well as for the heroes of his own Florence; pity for 
the victims of her fends, and even for the men who 
drove them into exile ; pity, most of all, for Florence 
herself. We read his story indeed at first with a strange 
sense of disappointment and surprise. To the modern 



166 STRAY STUDIES. 

reader, the story of Florence in the years which Dino 
covers is, above all, the story of Dante. As the " Chron- 
icle " jots patiently down the hopes and fears, the fail- 
ures and successes, of the wiser citizens in that strug- 
gle for order and good government which brought 
Dante to his long exile, we feel ourselves standing in 
the very midst of events out of which grew the three- 
fold poem of the After-world, and face to face with the 
men who front us in the " Inferno " and " Paradiso." 
But this is not the world Dino stands in. Of what 
seem to us the greater elements of the life around 
him he sees and tells us nothing. Of art or letters his 
" Chronicle " says never a word. The name of Dante 
is mentioned but once, and then without a syllable of 
comment. It is not in Dante that Dino interests him- 
self : his one interest, his one passion is Florence. 

And yet, as we read page after page, a new interest 
in the story grows on us, the interest that Dino himself 
felt in the tragedy around him. Our sympathies go 
with that earnest group of men to which he belonged, 
men who struggled honestly to reconcile freedom and 
order in a state torn with antipathies of the past, with 
jealousies and ambitions and feuds of the present. The 
terrible sadness of the "Divina Conwnedia" becomes 
more intelligible as we follow step by step the ruin of 
those hopes for his country which Dante entertained as 
well as Dino. And beyond this interest there is the 
social picture of the Florence of the fourteenth century 



THE FLORENCE OF DANTE. 167 

itself; its strange medley of past and present; the old 
world of feudalism jostling with the new world of com- 
merce; the trader elbowing the noble, and the artisan 
the trader; an enthusiastic mystical devotion jealous 
of the new classicalism, or the skepticism of men like 
Guido Cavalcanti ; the petty rivalries of great houses 
alternating with large schemes of public policy; the 
tenderest poetry with brutal outrage and lust ; the art 
of Giotte with the slow, patient blood-thirst of the ven- 
detta. 

What was the cause — the question presses on us 
through every page of Dino or of Dante — what was the 
cause of that ruin which waited in Florence, as in every 
Italian city, on so short a burst of freedom ? What was 
it that foiled alike the counsel of statesmen and the 
passionate love of liberty in the people at large ? What 
was it which drove Dante into exile, and stung the sim- 
ple-hearted Dino into a burst of eloquent despair ? The 
answer, if we set aside the silly talk about ■" democracy " 
and look simply at the facts themselves, is a very sim- 
ple one. The ruin of Florentine liberty, like the ruin 
of liberty elsewhere throughout Italy, lay wholly with 
its noblesse. It was equally perilous for an Italian 
town to leave its nobles without the walls, or to force 
them to reside within. In their own robber -holds or 
their own country estates, they were a scourge to the 
trader whose wains rolled temptingly past their walls. 
Florence, like its fellow Italian States, was driven to 



168 STRAY STUDIES. 

the demolition of the feudal castles, and to enforcing 
the residence of their lords within its own civic bounds. 
But the danger was only brought nearer home. Ex- 
cluded by civic jealousy, wise or unwise, from all share 
in municipal government, their huge palazzi rose like 
fortresses in every quarter of the city. Within them 
lay the noble, a wild beast all the fiercer for his confine- 
ment in so narrow a den, with the old tastes, hatreds, 
preferences utterly unchanged ; at feud, as of old, with 
his fellow -nobles; knit to them only by a common 
scorn of the burghers and the burgher life around them; 
stung to madness by his exclusion from all rule in the 
commonwealth, bitter, revengeful, with the willfulness 
of a child, shameless, false, unprincipled. 

The story which lies at the opening of the great feud 
between Guelph and Ghibelline in Florence throws a 
picturesque light on the temper of its nobility. Buon- 
delmonte, the betrothed lover of a daughter of Oderigo 
Giantrufetti, passes beneath a palace of the Donati at 
whose window stands Madonna Aldruda, with her two 
fair daughters. Seeing him pass by, Aldruda calls 
aloud to him, pointing with her finger to the damsel by 
her side. " Whom have you taken to wife ?" she says ; 
" this is the wife I kept for you." The damsel pleased 
the youth, but his troth bound him, and he answered, "I 
can wed none other — now, at any rate !" " Yes," cried 
Aldruda, " for I will pay the penalty for thee." " Then 
will I have her," said Buondehnonte. " Cosa fatta capo 



THE FLORENCE OF DANTE. 169 

ha," was the famous comment of the outraged house — 
"stone dead has no fellow" — and as Dino puts it, in the 
most ordinary way in the world, " they settled to kill 
him the day he was to have married the damsel, and 
so they did." "Kill, kill," echoes everywhere through 
the story of these Florentine nobles. Assassination is 
an event of every day. Corso Donati sends murderers 
to kill an enemy among the Cerchi. Guido Cavalcanti 
strives to stab Corso in the back as he passes him. 
Where the dagger fails, they try poison without scruple. 
The best of them decline a share in a murder much as 
an Irish peasant may decline a share in an agrarian out- 
rage, with a certain delicacy and readiness to stand by 
and see it done. When the assassination of the Bishop 
of Arezzo was decided on, Gnglielmo da Pazzi, who was 
in the counsel, protested "he would have been content 
had it been done without his knowledge ; but were the 
question put to him, he might not be guilty of his 
blood." 

Among such men even Corso Donati towers into a 
certain grandeur: "Knight he was, of great valor and 
renown ; gentle of blood and manners ; of a most fair 
body even to old age ; comely in figure, with delicate 
features and a white skin ; a pleasing, prudent, and el- 
oquent speaker; one who ever aimed at great ends; 
friend and comrade of great lords and nobles ; a man, 
too, of many friends and great fame throughout all 
Italy. Foe he was of the people and its leaders; the 



170 STRAY STUDIES. 

darling of soldiers, full of evil devices, evil -hearted, 






Such, was the man who drove Dante into exile: 
"Who for his pride was called 'II Barone,' so that 
when he passed through the land many cried 'Viva II 
Barone !' and the land seemed all his own." 

He stood not merely at the head of the Florentine 
nobility, but at the head of the great Guelph organ- 
ization, which extended from city to city throughout 
Tuscany — a league with its own leaders, its own policy, 
its own .treasure. In the attempt to seize this treasure 
for the general service of the State, the most popular 
of Florentine leaders, Giano della Bella, had been foiled 
and driven into exile. An honest attempt to secure 
the peace of the city by the banishment of Corso and 
his friends brought about the exile of Dante. It is 
plain that, powerless as they were before the united 
forces of the whole people, the nobles were strong 
enough, by simply biding their time and availing them- 
selves of popular divisions, to crush one opponent after 
another. And yet the struggle against them was one of 
life and death for the city. ISTo atom of the new civili- 
zation, the new spirit of freedom or humanity, seems to 
have penetrated among them. Behind the gloomy walls 
of their city fortresses they remained the mere murder- 
ous tyrants of a brutal feudalism. " I counsel, lords, 
that we free ourselves from this slavery," cried Berto 



THE FLORENCE OF DANTE. 171 

Frescobaldi to his brother nobles in the Church of San 
Jacopo. " Let us arm ourselves and run on to the Pi- 
azza, and there kill, friend and foe alike, as many as we 
find, so that neither we nor our children be ever subject 
to them more." Those who, like Sismondi, censure the 
sternness of the laws which pressed upon the nobles, 
forget what wild beasts they were intended to hold 
down. Their outbreaks were the blind outbreaks of 
mere ruffians. The victory of Corso over Dante and 
the wiser citizens was followed by a carnival of blood- 
shed, firing of houses, pillage, and lawlessness which 
wrings from Dino curses as bitter as those of the 
" Inferno." 

From the hopeless task of curbing the various ele- 
ments of disorder by the single force of each isolated 
city, the wiser and more patriotic among the men of 
that day turned in despair to the Empire. Guelph and 
Ghibelline, Papalist and Imperialist, were words which, 
as Dante saw, had now lost their old meaning. In the 
twelfth century the emperor was at once the foe of re- 
ligion, and the one obstacle to the rising freedom of the 
towns. In the fourteenth, that freedom had either per- 
ished by its own excesses, or, as at Florence, was strong 
enough to defy even an imperial assailant. Religion 
found its bitterest enemy in such a Pope as Boniface 
VIII., or the Church over which he ruled. Whatever 
might have been its fortune under happier circum- 
stances, the great experiment of democratic self -govern- 



172 STRAY STUDIES. 

ment, of free and independent city-states, had failed, 
whether from the wars of city with city, or from the 
civil feuds that rent each in sunder. The papacy could 
furnish no centre of union ; its old sanctity was gone ; 
its greed and worldliness weakened it every day. On 
the other hand, the remembrance of the tyranny of Bar- 
barossa, of the terrible struggle by which the peace of 
Constance had been won, had grown faint and dim in 
the course of years. It was long since Italy had seen 
an emperor at all. 

But the old Ghibellinism had recovered new vigor 
from an unlooked-for quarter. As the revival of the 
Roman law had given an artificial prestige to the em- 
pire in the twelfth century, so the revival of classical 
literature threw a new halo around it in the fourteenth. 
To Dante, penetrated with the greater Latin authors, 
Henry of Luxembourg is no stranger from over the 
Alps, but the descendant of the Augustus whom his own 
Virgil had loved and sung. The same classical feeling 
tells on Dino. With him Florence is "the daughter of 
Rome." The pages of Sallnst and of Livy have stirred 
him to undertake her annals. " The remembrance of 
ancient histories has long spurred my mind to write the 
events, full of danger, yet reaching to no prosperous end, 
that this noble city, daughter of Rome, has encount- 
ered." It was the same sense that united with his own 
practical appreciation of the necessities of the time," in 
his impatient longing for the intervention of the new 



THE FLORENCE OF DANTE. 173 

emperor. As prior, Dino had acted the part of a brave 
and honest man, striving to conciliate party with party, 
refusing to break the law, chased at last, with the rest 
of the magistracy, from the Palace of the Signory by 
the violence of Corso Donati and the nobles. If he did 
not share Dante's exile, he had, at any rate, acted with 
Dante in the course of policy which brought that penal- 
ty on him. Both were priors together in 1300 ; both 
have the same passionate love of Florence, the same 
haughty disdain of the factions that tore it to pieces. 
If the appeal of Dino to his fellows in Santa Trinita is 
less thrilling than the verse of Dante, it has its own pa- 
thetic force : " My masters, why will ye confound and 
undo so good a city ? Against whom do ye will to 
fight % Against your brethren % What victory will ye 
gain ? — none other than weeping I" The words fell on 
deaf ears; and the smoke of burning streets, slaughter, 
and exile forced Dino to look to the stranger. There is 
something strangely touching in the dry, passionless way 
in which he tracks Henry of Luxembourg from city to 
city, the fire of his real longing only breaking out here 
and there in pettish outbursts at each obstacle the em- 
peror finds. The weary waiting came to nothing. Dino 
leaves us still looking for Henry's coming; Dante tells 
us of the death that dashed all hope to the ground. 
Even in the hour of his despair the poet could console 
himself by setting his " divino Arrigo " in the regions of 
the blessed. What comfort the humble chronicler found 
whose work we have been studying, none can know. 



BUTTERCUPS. 



BUTTERCUPS. 



It is not the least debt we owe to the holidays that 
they give us our buttercups back again. Few faces 
have stirred us with a keener touch of pity through the 
whole of the season than the face of the pale, awkward 
girl who slips by us now and then on the stairs ; a face 
mutinous in revolt against its imprisonment in brick 
and mortar, dull with the boredom of the school-room, 
weary of the formal walk, the monotonous drive, the 
inevitable practice on that hated piano, the perpetual 
round of lessons from the odd creatures who leave their 
odder umbrellas in the hall. It is amazingly pleasant 
to meet the same little face on the lawn, and to see it 
blooming with new life at the touch of freedom and 
fresh air. It blooms with a sense of individuality, a 
sense of power. In the town the buttercup was nobody ; 
silent, unnoticed, lost in the bustle and splendor of elder 
sisterdom. Here, a,mong the fields and the hedges, she 
is queen. Her very laugh, the reckless shout that calls 
for mamma's frown, and dooms the governess to a head- 
ache, rings out like a claim of possession. .Here in her 
own realm she rushes at once to the front; and if we 

12 



178 STRAY STUDIES. 

find ourselves enjoying a scamper over the common or 
a run down the hill-side, it is the buttercup that leads 
the way. 

All the silent defiance of her town bondage vanishes, 
in the chatty familiarities of home. She has a story 
about the elm and the pond ; she knows where Harry 
landed the trout last year; she is intimate with the 
keeper, and hints to us his mysterious hopes about the 
pheasants. She is great in short cuts through the 
woods, and has made herself wondrous lurking-places, 
which she betrays under solemn promises of secrecy. 
She is a friend of every dog about the place; and if 
the pony lies nearest to her heart, her lesser affections 
range over a world of favorites. It is hard to remember 
the pale, silent, school -girl of town in the vivid, chatty 
little buttercup, who hurries one from the parrot to the 
pigeon, from the stables to the farm, and who knows 
and describes the merits of every hound in the kennels. 

It is natural enough that the dethroned beauties who 
meet us at luncheon should wonder at our enthusiasm 
for nymphs of bread-and-butter, and ask, with a certain 
severity of scorn, the secret of our happy mornings. 
The secret is simply that the buttercup is at home, and 
that, with the close of her bondage, comes a grace and 
a naturalness that take her out of the realms of bread- 
and-butter. However difficult it may be for her ma- 
turer rivals to abdicate, it is the buttercup, in fact, who 



BUTTERCUPS. 179 

gives the tone to the holidays. There is a subtle con- 
tagion about pleasure, and it is from her that we catch 
the sense of largeness and liberty and physical enjoy- 
ment that gives a new zest to life. She laughs at our 
moans about sunshine as she laughs at our moans about 
mud, till we are as indifferent to mud and sunshine as 
she is herself. The whole atmosphere of our life is, in 
fact, changed, and it is amusing to recognize how much 
of the change we owe to the buttercup. 

It is impossible, perhaps, to be whirled in this fashion 
out of the whisperings and boredoms of town, without 
longing to know a little more of the pretty magician 
who works this wonderful transformation scene. But 
it is no easy matter to know much of the buttercup. 
Her whole charm lies in her freedom from self -con- 
sciousness; she has a reserved force of shyness behind 
all her familiarity, and of a very defiant sort of shyness. 
Her character, in fact, is one of which it is easier to feel 
the beauty than to analyze or describe it. Like all tran- 
sitional phases, girlhood is full of picturesque inequali- 
ties, strange slumbers of one faculty and stranger devel- 
opments of another ; full of startling effects, of contrasts 
and surprises, of light and shade, that no other phase of 
life affords. Unconsciously, month after month, drifts 
the buttercup on to womanhood ; consciously, she lives 
in the past of the child. She comes to us trailing clouds 
of glory, as "Wordsworth sings, from her earlier exist- 
ence, from her home, her school - room, her catechism. 



180 STRAY STUDIES. 

The girl of twenty summers, whose faith has been 
wrecked by clerical croquet, looks with amazement on 
the implicit faith which the buttercup retains in the 
clergy. Even on the curate, shy and awkward as he is, 
she looks as on a being sacred and ineffable. Perhaps 
his very shyness and awkwardness creates a sympathy 
between the two, and rouses a keener remorse for her 
yawns under his sermons, and a keener gratitude for 
the heavenly generosity with which he bestowed on her 
the confirmation ticket. Free as she is from fancies, 
her conception of the daily life of her clergyman shows 
amusingly enough that she can attain a very fair pitch 
of idealism. We remember the story of a certain par- 
son of our acquaintance who owned to a meek little 
buttercup his habit of carrying a book in his pocket for 
reading in leisure hours. "Ah, yes," replied the eager 
little auditor, with a hush of real awe in her voice — 
" the Bible, of course !" Unluckily, it was the " Physi- 
ologie du Gout." 

Still more does the sister of a couple of seasons won- 
der at the ardor and fidelity of buttercup friendships. 
In after-life men have friends and women have lovers. 
The home and the husband and the child absorb the 
whole tenderness of a woman, where they only temper 
and moderate the old external affections of her spouse. 
But, then, girl-friendship is a much more vivid and far 
more universal thing than friendship among boys. The 
one means, in nine cases out of ten, an accident of 



BUTTERCUPS. 181 

neighborhood in school that fades with the next remove, 
or a partnership in some venture, or a common attach- 
ment to some particular game. But the school friend- 
ship of a girl is a passionate idolatry and devotion of 
friend for friend. Their desks are full of little gifts to 
each other. They have pet names that no strange ear 
may know, and hidden photographs that no strange eye 
may see. They share all the innocent secrets of their 
hearts ; they are fondly interested in one another's broth- 
ers ; they plan subtle devices to wear the same ribbons, 
and to dress their hair in the same fashion. No amount 
of affection ever made a boy like the business of writing 
his friend a letter in the holidays ; but half the charm 
of holidays to a girl lies in the letters she gets and the 
letters she sends. Nothing, save friendship itself, is 
more sacred to girlhood than a friend's letter; nothing 
more exquisite than the pleasure of stealing from the 
breakfast-table to kiss it and read it, and then tie it up 
with the rest that lie in the nook that nobody knows but 
the one pet brother. The pet brother is as necessary an 
element in buttercup life as the friend. He is generally 
the dullest, the most awkward, the- most silent of the 
family group. He takes all this sisterly devotion as a 
matter of course, and half resents it as a matter of bore- 
dom. He is fond of informing his adorer that lie hates 
girls, that they are always kissing and crying, and that 
they can't play cricket. The buttercup rushes away to 
pour out her woes to her little nest in the woods, and 
hurries back to worship as before. Girlhood, indeed, is 



182 STRAY STUDIES. 

the one stage of feminine existence in which woman 
has brothers. Her first season out digs a gulf between 
their sister and " the boys " of the family that nothing 
can fill up. Henceforth the latter are useful to get 
tickets for her, to carry her shawls, to drive her to Good- 
wood or to Lord's. In the mere fetching-and-carrying 
business they sink into the general ruck of cousins, 
grumbling only a little more than cousins usually do at 
the luck that dooms them to hew wood and draw water 
for the belle of the season. But in the pure equality of 
earlier days the buttercup shares half the games and all 
the secrets of the boys about her, and brotherhood and 
sisterhood are very real things indeed. 

Unluckily, the holidays pass away, and the buttercup 
passes away like the holidays. There is a strange hu- 
mor about the subtle gradations by which girlhood pass- 
es out of all this free, genial, irreflective life into the 
self-consciousness, the reserve, the artificiality of woman- 
hood. It is the sudden discovery of a new sense of en- 
joyment that first whirls the buttercup out of her purely 
family affections. She laughs at the worship of her new 
adorer. She is as far as Dian herself from any return 
of it ; but the sense of power is awakened, and she has 
a sort of Puckish pride in bringing her suitor to her 
feet. Nobody is so exacting, so capricious, so uncertain, 
so fascinating as a buttercup, because no one is so per- 
fectly free from love. The first touch of passion ren- 
ders her more exacting and more charming than ever. 



BUTTERCUPS. 183 

She resents the suspicion of a tenderness whose very 
novelty scares her, and she visits her resentment on her 
worshiper. If he enjoys a kind farewell overnight, he 
atones for it by the coldest greeting in the morning. 
There are days when the buttercup runs amuck among 
her adorers, days of snubbing and sarcasm and bitterness. 
The poor little bird beats savagely against the wires that 
are closing her round. And, then, there are days of 
pure abandon and coquetry and fun. The buttercup 
flirts ; but she flirts in such an open and ingenuous fash- 
ion that nobody is a bit the worse for it. She tells you 
the fun she had overnight with that charming young 
fellow from Oxford, and you know that to-morrow she 
will be telling that hated Guardsman what fun she has 
had with you. She is a little dazzled with the wealth 
and profusion of the new life that is bursting on her, 
and she wings her way from one charming flower to 
another, with little thought of more than a sip from 
each. Then there is a return of pure girlhood, days 
in which the buttercup is simply the buttercup again. 
Flirtations are forgotten, conquests are abandoned, broth- 
ers are worshiped with the old worship; and we start 
back, and rub our eyes, and wonder whether life is all a 
delusion, and whether this pure creature of home and 
bread-and-butter is the volatile, provoking little puss 
who gave our hand such a significant squeeze yesterday. 

But it is just this utterly illogical, unreasonable, in- 
consequential character that gives the pursuit of the 



184 STRAY STUDIES. 

buttercup its charm. There is a pleasure in this irreg- 
ular warfare, with its razzias, and dashes, and repulses, 
and successes, and skirmishes, and flights, which we can 
not get out of the regular operations of the sap and the 
mine. We sympathize with the ingenious gentleman 
who declined to study astronomy, on the ground of his 
dislike to the sun for the monotonous regularity of its 
daily rising and setting. There is something delight- 
fully cometary about the affection of the buttercup. 
Any experienced strategist in the art of getting married 
will tell us the exact time within which her elder sister 
may be reduced, and sketch for us a plan of the cam- 
paign. But the buttercup lies outside of the rules of 
war. She gives one the pleasure of adoration in its 
purest and most ideal form, and she adds to this the 
pleasure of rouge et noir. One feels in the presence 
of a buttercup the possibility of combining enjoyments 
which are in no other sphere compatible with each oth- 
er — the delight, say, of a musing over " In Memoriam " 
with the fiercer joys of the gaming-table. And mean- 
while the buttercup drifts on, recking little of us and of 
our thoughts, into a world mysterious and unknown to 
her. Tones of deeper color flush the pure white light 
of her dawn, and announce the fuller day of woman- 
hood. And with the death of the dawn the buttercup 
passes insensibly away. The next season steals her 
from us : it is only the holidays that give her to us, and 
dispel half our conventionality, our shams, our conceit, 
with the laugh of the buttercup. 



ABBOT AND TOWN. 



ABBOT AND TOWN. 



The genius of a great writer of our own days has 
made Abbot Sampson, of St. Edmunds, the most familiar 
of mediaeval names to the bulk of Englishmen. By a 
rare accident, the figure of the silent, industrious Norfolk 
monk who, at the elose of Henry the Second's reign, 
suddenly found himself ruler of the wealthiest, if not 
the greatest, of English abbeys, starts out distinct from 
the dim canvas of the annals of his house. Annals, in- 
deed, in any strict sense, St. Edmunds has none ; no na- 
tional chronicle was ever penned in its scriptorium. 
such as that which flings lustre round its rival, St. Al- 
bans ; nor is even a record of its purely monastic life 
preserved, such as that which gives a local and ecclesi- 
astical interest to its rival of Glastonbury. One book 
alone the abbey has given us, but that one book is worth 
a thousand chronicles. In the wandering, gossipy pages 
of Jocelyn of Brakeland, the life of the twelfth century, 
so far as it could penetrate abbey walls, still glows dis- 
tinct for us round the figure of the shrewd, practical, 
kindly, imperious abbot who looks out, a little travestied, 
perhaps, from the pages of Mr. Carlyle. 



188 STRAY STUDIES. 

It is, however, to an incident in this abbot's life, 
somewhat later than most of the events told so vividly 
in " Past and Present," that I wish to direct my readers' 
attention. A good many eventful years had passed by 
since Sampson stood abbot-elect in the court of King 
Henry. It was from the German prison where Rich- 
ard was lying captive that the old abbot was returning, 
sad at heart', to his stately house. His way lay through 
the little town that sloped quietly down to the abbey 
walls, alons: the narrow little street that led to the state- 
ly gate-tower, now gray with the waste of ages, but then 
fresh and white from the builder's hand. It may have 
been in the shadow of that gate-way that a group of 
townsmen stood gathered to greet the return of their 
lord, but with other business on hand besides kindly 
greeting. There was a rustling of parchment as the 
alderman unfolded the town charters, recited the brief 
grants of Abbots Anselm and Ording and Hugh, and 
begged from the lord abbot a new confirmation of the 
liberties of the town. 

As Sampson paused a moment — he was a prudent, 
deliberate man in all his ways — he must have read in 
the faces of all the monks who gathered round him, in 
the murmured growl that monastic obedience just kept 
w T ithin bounds, very emphatic counsel of refusal. On 
the other hand, there was the alderman pleading for 
the old privileges of the town — for security of justice 
in its own town-mote, for freedom of sale in its market, 



ABBOT AND TOWN. 189 

for just provisions to enforce the recovery of debts — 
the simple, efficient liberty that stood written in the 
parchment with the heavy seals, the seals of Anselm 
and Ording and Hugh. " Only the same words as 
your predecessor used, Lord Abbot — simply the same 
words;" and then came the silvery jingle of the sixty 
marks that the townsmen offered for their lord's as- 
sent. A moment more, and the assent was won, " given 
pleasantly, too," the monks commented bitterly, as, 
" murmuring and grunting," to use their own emphatic 
phrase, they led Sampson to the chapter -house. But 
murmurings and gruntings broke idly against the old 
abbot's imperious will. "Let the brethren, murmur," 
he flashed out when one of his friends told him there 
was discontent in the cloister at his dealings with the 
townsmen ; " let them blame me, and say among them- 
selves what they will. I am their father and abbot. 
So long as I live, I will not give mine honor to an- 
other." 

The words were impatient, willful enough ; but it was 
the impatience of a man who frets at the blindness of 
others to what is clear and evident to his own finer 
sense. The shrewd, experienced eye of the old Church- 
man read with a perfect sagacity the signs of the times. 
He had just stood face to face in his German prison 
with one who, mere reckless soldier as he seemed, had 
read them as clearly, as sagaciously as himself. When 
History drops her drums and trumpets and learns to 



190 STKAY STUDIES. 

tell the story of Englishmen, it will find the significance 
of Richard, not in his crusade or in his weary wars 
along the Norman border, but in his lavish recognition 
of municipal life. When, busy w T ith the preparations 
for his Eastern journey, the king sold charter after 
charter to the burgesses of his towns, it seemed a mere 
outburst of royal greed, a mere carrying-out of his own 
bitter scoff that he would have sold London itself could 
he have found a purchaser. But the hard, cynical words 
of the Angevins were veils which they flung over po- 
litical conceptions too large for the comprehension of 
their day. Richard was, in fact, only following out the 
policy which had been timidly pursued by his father, 
which was to find its fullest realization under John. 

The silent growth and elevation of the English peo- 
ple was the real work of their reigns, and in this work 
the boroughs led the way. Unnoticed and despised, 
even by the historian of to-day, they had alone pre- 
served the full tradition of Teutonic liberty. The right 
of self-government, the right of free speech in free Par- 
liament, the right of equal justice by one's peers — it was 
these that the towns had brought safely across the ages 
of Norman rule ; these that, by the mouth of traders and 
shop-keepers, asked recognition from the Angevin kings. 
Xo liberty was claimed in the Great Charter for the 
realm at large which had not, in borough after borough, 
been claimed and won beforehand by plain burgesses 
whom the " mailed barons," who wrested it from their 



ABBOT AND TOWN. 191 

king, would have despised. That out of the Leap of 
borough eliarters whicL Le flung back to these towns- 
men that Charter was to be born, Richard could not 
know; but that a statesman so keen and far-sighted as 
he really was could Lave been driven by mere greed of 
gold, or Lave been utterly blind to tlie real nature of 
the forces to which he gave legal recognition, is impos- 
sible. We have no such pithy hints of what was pass- 
ing in his mind as we shall find Abbot Sampson drop- 
ping, in the course of our story. But Richard can hard- 
ly have failed to note what these hints proved his mi- 
tred counselor to have noted well — the silent revolu- 
tion which was passing over the land, and which in a 
century and a half had raised serfs like those of St. Ed- 
munds into freeholders of a town. 

It is only in such lowly records as those which we 
are about to give that we can follow the progress of 
that revolution. But simple as the tale is, there is hard- 
ly better historic training for a man than to set him 
frankly in the streets of a quiet little town like Bury 
St. Edmunds, and bid him work out the history of the 
men who lived and died there. In the quiet, quaintly 
named streets, in the town-mead and the market-place, 
in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the ruffed and 
furred brasses of its burghers in the church, lies the 
real life of England and Englishmen — the life of their 
home and their trade — their ceaseless, sober struggle 
with oppression — their steady, unwearied battle for 



192 STRAY STUDIES. 

self-government. It is just in the pettiness of its de- 
tails, in its commonplace incidents, in the want of 
marked features and striking events, that the real les- 
son of the whole story lies. For two centuries this 
little town of Bury St. Edmunds was winning liberty 
for itself ; and yet we hardly note, as we pass from one 
little step to another little step, how surely that liberty 
was being won. It is hard, indeed, merely to catch a 
glimpse of the steps. The monks were too busy with 
royal endowments, and papal grants of mitre and ring, 
too full of their struggles with arrogant bishops and en- 
croaching barons, to tell us how the line of tiny hovels 
crept higher and higher, from the abbey gate up the 
westerly sunlit slope. It is only by glimpses that we 
catch sight of the first steps toward civic life, of market 
and market- toll, of flax-growing, and women with dis- 
taffs at their door, of fullers at work along the abbey- 
stream, of gate-keepers for the rude walls, of town- 
meetings summoned in old Teutonic fashion by blast 
of horn. 

It is the Great Survey of the Conqueror that gives 
us our first clear peep at the town. Much that had 
been plow-land in the time of the Confessor was cover- 
ed with houses under the Norman rule. No doubt the 
great abbey- church of stone that Abbot Baldwin was 
raising amidst all the storm of the Conquest drew its 
craftsmen and masons to mingle with the plowers and 
reapers of the broad domain. The troubles of the time, 



ABBOT AND TOWN. 193 

too, did their part here as elsewhere ; the serf, the fugi- 
tive from justice or his lord, the trader, the Jew, would 
naturally seek shelter under the strong hand of St. Ed- 
mund. On the whole, the great house looked kindly 
on a settlement which raised the value of its land, and 
brought fresh pence to the cellarer. Not a settler that 
held his acre for a year and a day but paid his pence to 
the treasury, and owned the abbot for his lord. Not 
a serf but was bound to plow a rood of the abbot's 
land, to reap in the abbot's harvest -field, to fold his 
sheep in the abbey folds, to help bring the annual catch 
of eels from the abbey waters. Within the four cr 
that bounded the abbot's domain, land and water were 
his ; the cattle of the townsmen paid for their pasture 
on the common ; if the fullers refused the loan of their 
cloth, the cellarer would withhold the use of the stream, 
and seize their looms wherever he found them. Land 
lord's rights passed easily as ever into landlord's wrongs. 
Xo toll, for instance, might be levied on a purchaser of 
produce from the abbey farms, and the house drove 
better bargains than its country rivals. First-purchase 
was a privilege even more vexatious, and we can catch 
the low growl of the customers as they waited, with 
folded hands, before shop and stall, till the buyers of 
the lord abbot had had their pick of the market. But 
there was little chance of redress; for if they growled 
in the town-mote, there were the abbot's officers, before 
whom the meeting must be held ; and if they growled 
to their alderman, he was the abbot's nominee, and re- 

13 



194 STRAY STUDIES. 

ceived the symbol of office, the mot-horn, the town-horn, 
at his hands. 

By what process these serfs of a rural hamlet had 
grown into the busy burgesses whom we saw rustling 
their parchments and chinking their silver marks in the 
ears of Abbot Sampson in Richard's time, it is hard to 
say. Like all the greater revolutions of society, this ad- 
vance was a silent one. The more galling and oppress- 
ive instances of serfdom seem to have slipped uncon- 
sciously away. Some, like the eel - fishery, were com- 
muted for an easy rent; others, like the slavery of the 
fullers and the toll of flax, simply disappeared. No one 
could tell when the retainers of the abbey came to lose 
their exemption from local taxation, and to pay the 
town -penny to the alderman like , the rest of the bur- 
gesses. "In some way, I don't know how" — as Joce- 
lyn grumbles about just such an unnoted change — by 
usage, by omission, by downright forgetfulness, here by 
a little struggle, there by a little present to a needy ab- 
bot, the town won freedom. But progress was not al- 
ways unconscious ; and one incident in the history of 
Bury St. Edmunds, remarkable if only regarded as 
marking the advance of law, is yet more remarkable as 
indicating the part which a new moral sense of human 
right to equal justice was to play in the general advance 
of the realm. 

The borough, as we have seen, had preserved the old 



ABBOT AND TOWN. 195 

English right of meeting in full assembly of the towns- 
men for government and law. In the presence of the 
burgesses justice was administered in the old English 
fashion, and the accused acquitted or condemned by 
the oath of his neighbors, the " compurgators," out of 
whom our jury was to grow. Hough and inadequate 
as such a process seems to us, it insured substantial 
justice; the meanest burgher had his trial by his peers 
as thoroughly as the belted earl. Without the borough 
bounds, however, the system of the JSorman judicature 
prevailed. The rural tenants, who did suit and service 
at the cellarer's court, were subject to the "judicial 
duel" which the Conqueror had introduced. In the 
twelfth century, however, the strong tendency to nation- 
al unity told heavily against judicial inequality, and the 
barbarous injustice of the foreign system became too 
apparent even for the baronage or the Church to up- 
hold it. "Rebel's case," as a lawyer would term it, 
brought the matter to an issue at Bury St. Edmunds. 
In the opinion of his neighbors, Ivebel seems to have 
been guiltless of the robbery with which he had been 
charged ; but he was " of the cellarer's fee," and subject 
to the feudal jurisdiction of his court. The duel went 
against him, and he was hung just without the gates. 
The taunts of the townsmen woke the farmers to a 
sense of their wrong. "Had Kebel been a dweller 
within the borough," said the burgesses, "he would 
have got his acquittal from the oaths of his neighbors, 
as our liberty is." The scandal at last moved the con- 



196 STRAY STUDIES. 

vent itself to action. The monks were divided in opin- 
ion, but the saner part determined that their tenants 
"should enjoy equal liberty" with the townsmen. The 
cellarer's court was abolished ; the franchise of the 
town was extended to the rural possessions of the ab- 
bey; the farmers "came to the toll -house, and were 
written in the alderman's roll, and paid the town- 
penny." 

A moral revolution like this is notable at any time ; 
but a change, wrought avowedly " that all might enjoy 
equal liberty," is especially notable in the twelfth cent- 
ury. Cases like Kebel's were everywhere sounding the 
knell of feudal privilege and of national division long 
before freedom fronted John by the sedges of Runny- 
mede. Slowly and fitfully through the reign of his fa- 
ther, the new England, which had grown out of con- 
quered and conquerors, woke to self- consciousness. It 
was this awakening that Abbot Sampson saw and noted 
with his clear, shrewd eyes. To him, we can hardly 
doubt, the revolt of the town - wives, for instance, was 
more than a mere scream of angry women. The " rep- 
silver," the commutation for that old service of reaping 
in the abbot's fields, had ceased to be exacted from the 
richer burgesses. At last the poorer sort refused to pay. 
Then the cellarer's men came, seizing gate and stool by 
way of distress, till the women turning out, distaff in 
hand, put them ignominiously to flight. Sampson had 
his own thoughts about the matter ; saw, perhaps, that 



ABBOT AND TOWN. 197 

the days of inequality were over ; that in the England 
that was coming there would be one law for rich and 
poor. At any rate, he quietly compromised the ques- 
tion for twenty shillings a year. 

The convent was indignant. "Abbot Ording, who 
lies there," muttered an angry monk, as he pointed to 
the tomb in the choir, " would not have done this for 
live hundred marks of silver." That their abbot should 
capitulate to a mob of infuriated town -wives was too 
much for the patience of the brotherhood. All at once 
they opened their eyes to the facts which had been go- 
ing on unobserved for so many long years. There was 
their own town growing ; burgesses encroaching on the 
market space; settlers squatting on their own acre with 
no leave asked ; aldermen who were once only the ab- 
bey servants taking on themselves to give permission for 
this and that ; tradesmen thriving and markets increas- 
ing, and the abbey never one penny the richer for it all. 
It was quite time that Abbot Sampson should be roused 
to do his duty, and to do it in very sharp fashion indeed. 
However, we will let one of the monks tell his own tale 
in his own gossiping way : 

" In the tenth year of Abbot Sampson's abbacy, we 
monks, after full deliberation in chapter, laid our form- 
al plaint before the abbot in his court. We said that 
the rents and revenues of all the good towns and bor-' 
oughs in England were steadily growing and increasing 



198 STRAY STUDIES. 

to the enrichment of their lords, in every case save in 
that of our town of St. Edmund. The customary rent 
of forty pounds which it pays never rises higher. That 
this is so, we imputed solely to the conduct of the towns- 
people, who are continually building new shops and 
stalls in the market-place without any leave of the con- 
vent " (abbey -land though it was). " The only permis- 
sion, in fact, which they ask is that of their alderman, 
an officer who himself was of old times a mere servant 
of our sacrist, and bound to pay into his hands the year- 
ly rent of the town, and removable at his pleasure." 

Never, Jocelyn evidently thinks, was a case plainer; 
but into the justice or injustice of it the burgesses re- 
fused sturdily to enter. When they were summoned to 
make answer, they pleaded simple possession. " They 
were in the king's justice, and no answer would they 
make concerning tenements which they and their fa- 
thers had held in peace for a year and a day. Such an- 
swer would, in fact," they added, " be utterly contrary 
to the freedom of the town." No plea could have been 
legally more complete, as none could have been more 
provoking. The monks turned in a rage upon the ab- 
bot, and simply requested him to eject their opponents. 
Then they retired angrily into the chapter -house, and 
waited, in a sort of white-heat, to hear what the abbot 
would do. This is what Sampson did. He quietly bid 
the townsmen wait; then he "came into chapter just 
like one of ourselves, and told us privily that he would 



ABBOT AND TOWN. 199 

right us as far as he could, but that if he were to act it 
must be by law. Be the case right or wrong, lie did 
not dare eject without trial his free men from land and 
property which they had held year after year; in fact, 
if he did so, he would at once fall into the king's jus- 
tice. At this moment in came the towns-folk into the 
chapter-house, and offered to compromise the matter for 
an annual quit-rent of a hundred shillings. This offer 
we refused. We preferred a simple adjournment of 
our claim, in the hope that in some other abbot's time 
we might get all back again." 

Notwithstanding his many very admirable qualities, 
in fact, this present abbot was, on these municipal points, 
simply incorrigible. Was it quite by an oversight, for 
instance, that in Sampson's old age, "in some w T ay, I 
don't quite know how, the new alderman of the town 
got chosen in other places than in chapter, and without 
leave of the house " — in simple town-motes, that is, and 
by sheer downright delegation of power on the part of 
his fellow -burgesses? At any rate, it was by no over- 
sight that Sampson granted his charter on the day he 
came back from Richard's prison, when "we monks 
were murmuring and grumbling " in his very ear ! And 
yet was the abbot foolish in his generation ? This char- 
ter of his ranks lineally among the ancestors of that 
Great Charter which his successor was first to unroll on 
the altar-steps of the choir (we can still measure off the 
site in the rough field by the great piers of the tower 



200 STRAY STUDIES. 

arch that remain) before the baronage of the realm. At 
any rate, half a century after that scene in chapter, the 
new England that Sampson had foreseen came surging 
stormily enough against the abbey gates. Later abbots 
had set themselves sturdily against his policy of conces- 
sion and conciliation ; and riots, lawsuits, royal commis- 
sions mark the troubled relations of Town and Abbey 
under the first two Edwards. Under the third came the 
fierce conflict of 1327. 

On the 25th of January in that year, the townsmen 
of Bury St. Edmunds, headed by Richard Drayton, burst 
into the abbey. Its servants were beaten off, the monks 
driven into choir, and dragged thence, with their prior 
(for the abbot was away in London), to the town prison. 
The abbey itself was sacked; chalices, missals, chasubles, 
tnnicles, altar frontals, the books of the library, the very 
vats and dishes of the kitchen, all disappeared. Chat- 
tels valued at ten thousand pounds, five hundred pounds' 
worth of coin, three thousand " florins " — this was the 
abbey's estimate of its loss. But neither florins nor 
chasubles were what their assailants really aimed at. 
Their next step shows what were the grievances which 
had driven the burgesses to this fierce outbreak of re- 
volt. They were as much personal as municipal. The 
gates of the town, indeed, were still in the abbot's 
hands. He had succeeded in enforcing his claim to the 
wardship of orphans born within his domain. From 
claims such as these the town could never feel itself 



ABBOT AND TOWN. 201 

safe so long as mysterious charters from pope and king, 
interpreted yet more mysteriously by the wit of the new 
lawyer class, were stored in the abbey archives. But 
the archives contained other and yet more formidable 
documents. The religious houses, untroubled by the 
waste of war, had profited more than any land-owmers, 
by the general increase of wealth. They had become 
great proprietors, money-lenders to their tenants, extor- 
tionate as the Jew whom they had banibhed from the 
land. There were few townsmen of St. Edmund who 
had not some bond laid up in the abbey registry. Nich- 
olas Fowke and a band of debtors had a covenant lying 
there for the payment of five hundred marks and fifty 
casks of wine. Philip Clopton's mark bound him to 
discharge a debt of twenty-two pounds; a whole com- 
pany of the wealthier burgesses were joint debtors in a 
bond for no less a sum than ten thousand pounds. The 
new spirit of commercial enterprise, joined with the 
troubles of the time, seems to have thrown the whole 
community into the abbot's hands. 

It was from the troubles of the time that the burghers 
looked for escape; and the general disturbance which 
accompanied the deposition of Edward II. seems to 
have quickened their longing into action. Their revolt 
soon disclosed its practical aims. From their prison 
in the town the trembling prior and his monks were 
brought back to their own chapter-house. The spoil of 
their registry — the papal bulls and the royal charters, 



202 STRAY STUDIES. 

the deeds and bonds and mortgages of the townsmen — 
were laid before them. Amidst the wild threats of the 
mob, they were forced to execute a grant of perfect 
freedom and of a guild to the town, and a full release 
to their debtors. Then they were left masters of the 
ruined house. But all control over the town was gone. 
Through spring and summer no rent or fine was paid. 
The bailiffs and other officers of the abbey did not dare 
to show their faces in the streets. Then news came that 
the abbot was in London, appealing for aid to king and 
court, and the whole county was at once on fire. A 
crowd of rustics, maddened at the thought of revived 
claims of serfage, of interminable suits of law which 
had become a tyranny, poured into the streets of the 
town. From thirty-two of the neighboring villages the 
priests marched, at the head of their flocks, to this new 
crusade. Twenty thousand in number, so men guessed, 
the wild mass of .men, women, and children rushed 
again on the abbey. For four November days the work 
of destruction went on unhindered, while gate, stables, 
granaries, kitchen, infirmary, hostelry went up in flames. 
From the wreck of the abbey itself the great multitude 
swept away, too, the granges and barns of the abbey 
farms. The monks had become vast agricultural pro- 
prietors : one thousand horses, one hundred and twenty 
oxen, two hundred cows, three hundred bullocks, three 
hundred hogs, ten thousand sheep were driven off for 
spoil, and, as a last outrage, the granges and barns 
were burned to the ground. Sixty thousand pounds, 



ABBOT AND TOWN. 203 

the justiciaries afterward decided, would hardly cover 
the loss. 

Weak as w T as the government of Mortimer and Isa- 
bella, there never was a time in English history when 
government stood with folded hands before a scene 
such as this. The appeal of the abbot was no longer 
neglected ; a royal force quelled the riot, and exacted 
vengeance for this breach of the king's peace. Thir- 
ty carts full of prisoners were dispatched to Norwich; 
twenty-four of the chief townsmen, thirty-two of the 
village priests, were convicted as aiders and abettors. 
Twenty were at once summarily hung. But with this 
first vigorous effort at repression the danger seemed 
again to roll away. Nearly two hundred persons re- 
mained, indeed, under sentence of outlawry, and for five 
weary years their case dragged on in the king's courts. 
At last matters ended in a lawless, ludicrous outrage. 
Out of patience, and irritated by repeated breaches of 
promise on the abbot's part, the outlawed burgesses 
seized him as he lay in his manor of Chevington, rob- 
bed, bound, and shaved him, and carried him off to Lon- 
don. There he was hurried from street to street, lest 
his hiding-place should be detected, till opportunity of- 
fered for his shipping off to Brabant. The Archbishop 
of Canterbury, the pope himself, leveled their excom- 
munications against the perpetrators of this daring out- 



The prison of their victim was at last discovered ; he 



204 STRAY STUDIES. 

was released and brought home. But the lesson seems 
to have done good. The year 1332 saw a concordat 
arranged between the Abbey and Town. The damages 
assessed by the royal justiciaries — a sum enormous now, 
but incredible then — were remitted, the outlawry was 
reversed, the prisoners were released. On the other 
hand, the deeds were again replaced in the archives of 
the abbey, and the charters which had been extorted 
from the trembling monks were formally canceled. In 
other words, the old process of legal oppression was left 
to go on. The spirit of the townsmen was, as we shall 
see, crushed by the failure of their outbreak of despair. 
It was from a new quarter that help was for a moment 
to come. No subject is more difficult to treat, as noth- 
ing is more difficult to explain, than the communal re- 
volt which shook the throne of Richard II., and the 
grievances which prompted it. But one thing is clear: 
it was a revolt against oppression which veiled itself 
under the form of law. The rural tenants found them- 
selves in a mesh of legal claims — old services revived, 
old dues enforced, endless suits in the king's courts 
grinding them again to serfage. Oppression was no 
longer the rough blow of the rough baron ; it was the 
delicate, ruthless tyranny of the lawyer-clerk. 

Prior John, of Cambridge, who, in the vacancy of the 
abbot, was now in charge of the house, was a man skill- 
ed in all the arts of his day. In sweetness of voice, in 
knowledge of sacred song, his eulogists pronounced him 



ABBOT AND TOWN. 205 

the superior of Orpheus, of Xero, of one jet more 
illustrious but, save in the Bury cloisters, more obscure, 
the Breton Belgabred. lie was a man " industrious 
and subtle ;" and subtlety and industry found their 
scope in suit after suit with the farmers and burgesses 
around. " Faithfully he strove," says his monastic eu- 
logist, ''with the villeins of Bury for the rights of his 
house." The townsmen he owned as his foes, his " ad- 
versaries ;" but it was the rustics who were especially 
to show how memorable a hate he had won. It was a 
perilous time in which to win men's hate. We have 
seen the private suffering of the day, but nationally, 
too, England was racked with despair and the sense of 
wrong ; with the collapse of the French war, with the 
ruinous taxation, with the frightful pestilence that had 
swept away half the population ; with the iniquitous 
labor- laws that, in the face of such a reduction, kept 
down the rate of wages in the interest of the landlords; 
with the frightful law of settlement that, to enforce 
this wrong, reduced at a stroke the free laborer again 
to a serfage from which he has yet fully to emerge. 
That terrible revolution of social sentiment had begun 
which was to turn law into the instrument of the basest 
interests of a class, which was, with the statute of labor- 
ers and the successive labor regulations that followed, 
to create pauperism, and w T ith pauperism to create that 
hatred of class to class which han^s like a sick dream 
over us to-day. The earliest, the most awful instance 
of such a hatred was gathering round Prior John, while 



206 STRAY STUDIES. 

at his manor-house of Mildenhall he studied his parch- 
ments, and touched a defter lute than Nero or the Bre- 
ton Belgabred. In a single hour hosts of armed men 
arose, as it were, out of the earth. Kent gathered round 
Wat Tyler; in Norfolk, in Essex, fifty thousand peas- 
ants hoisted the standard of Jack Straw. It was no 
longer a local rising or a local grievance, no longer the 
old English revolution headed by the baron and priest. 
Priest and baron were swept away before this sudden 
storm of national hate. The howl of the great multi- 
tude broke roughly in on the delicate chanting of Prior 
John. He turned to fly, but his own serfs betrayed 
him, judged him in rude mockery of the law that had 
wronged them, condemned him, killed him.* Five days 
the corpse lay half stripped in the open field, none dar- 
ing to bury it — so ran the sentence of his murderers — 
while the mob poured unresisted into Bury. The scene 
was liker some wild orgy of the French Revolution than 
any after-scenes in England. Bearing the prior's head 
on a lance before them through the streets, the frenzied 
throng reached at last the gallows where the head of 
Cavendish, the chief -justice, stood already impaled, and, 
pressing the cold lips together, in fierce mockery of the 
old friendship between the two, set them side by side. 

* To one who knows what frightful cruelty and oppression may lie in 
simple legal phrases, the indignant sentence in which Walsingham tells 
his death is the truest comment on the scene: "Non tarn villanorum 
praedictse villas de Bury, suorum adversariorum, sed propriorum servorum 
et nativorum arbitrio simul et judicio addictus morti." 



ABBOT AND TOWN. 207 

Another head soon joined them. The abbey gates 
had been burst open ; the cloister was full of the dense 
maddened crowd, howling for a new victim, John Lack- 
enheath. "Warden of the barony as he was, few knew 
him, as he stood among the group of trembling monks ; 
there was still, amidst this outburst of frenzy, the dread 
of a coming revenge, and the rustic who had denounced 
him had stolen back silent into the crowd. But if 
Lackenheath resembled the French nobles in the hatred 
he had roused, he resembled them also in the cool, con- 
temptuous courage with which they fronted death. " I 
am the man you seek," he said, stepping forward ; and 
in a moment, with a mighty roar of " Devil's son !" 
" Monk !" " Traitor 1" he was swept to the gallows, and 
his head hacked from his shoulders. Then the crowd 
rolled back again to the abbey gate and summoned the 
monks before them. The} T told them that now, for a 
long time, they had oppressed their fellows, the bur- 
gesses of Bury ; wherefore they willed that, in the sight 
of the Commons, they should forthwith surrender their 
bonds and their charters. The monks brought the 
parchments to the market-place; many which might 
have served the purposes of the townsmen they swore 
they could not find. The Commons disbelieved them, 
and bid the burgesses inspect the documents. But the 
iron had entered too deeply into these men's souls. Not 
even in their hour of triumph could they shake off their 
awe of the trembling black-robed masters who stood be- 
fore them. A compromise was patched up. The char- 



208 STRAY STUDIES. 

ters should be surrendered till the popular claimant of 
the abbacy should confirm them. Then, unable to do 
more, the great crowd ebbed away. 

Common history tells the upshot of the revolt; the 
despair when, in the presence of the boy-king, Wat Ty- 
ler was struck down by a foul treason ; the ruin when 
the young martial Bishop of Norwich came trampling 
in upon the panic-stricken multitude at Barton. Na- 
tionally, the movement had wrought good. From this 
time the law was modified in practice, and the tendency 
to reduce a whole class to serfage was effectually check- 
ed. But to Bury it brought little but harm. A hun- 
dred years later the town again sought freedom in the 
law courts, and again sought it in vain. The abbey 
charters told fatally against mere oral customs. The 
royal council of Edward IV. decided that " the abbot 
is lord of the whole town of Bury, the sole head and 
captain within the town." All municipal appointments 
were at his pleasure, all justice in his hands. The 
townsmen had no communal union, no corporate exist- 
ence. Their leaders paid for riot and insult by impris- 
onment and fine. 

The dim, dull lawsuit was almost the last incident 
in the long struggle, the last and darkest for the town. 
But it was the darkness that goes before the day. Fif- 
ty years more, and abbot and abbey were swept away 
together, and the burghers were building their houses 



ABBOT AND TOWN. 209 

afresh with the carved ashlar and the stately pillars of 
their lord's house. Whatever other aspects the Refor- 
mation may present, it gave, at any rate, emancipation 
to the one class of English to whom freedom had been 
denied, the towns that lay in the dead hand of the 
Church. None more heartily echoed the Protector's 
jest, "We must pull down the rooks' nests, lest the 
rooks may come back again," than the burghers of St. 
Edmunds. The completeness of the Bury demolitions 
hangs perhaps on the long serfdom of the town, and the 
shapeless masses of rubble that alone recall the graceful 
cloister and the long-drawn aisle may find their explana- 
tion in the story of the town's struggles. But the story 
has a pleasanter ending. The charter of James — for 
the town had passed into the king's hands as the abbot's 
successor — gave all that it had ever contended for, and 
crowned the gift by the creation of a mayor. Modern 
reform has long since swept away the municipal oli- 
garchy which owed its origin to the Stuart king. But 
the essence of his work remains ; and in its mayor, with 
his fourfold glory of maces borne before him, Bury sees 
the strange close of the battle waged through so many 
centuries for simple self-government. 

14 



HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS. 



HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS, 



When the snow has driven every body home again 
from the Oberland and the Rigi, and all the Swiss ho- 
tel-keepers have resumed their original dignity as Lan- 
dammans of their various cantons, it is a little amusing 
to reflect how much of the pleasure of one's holiday has 
been due to one's own countrymen. It is not that the 
Englishman abroad is particularly entertaining, for the 
Frenchman is infinitely more vivacious ; nor that he is 
peculiarly stolid, for he yields in that to most of the 
German students, who journey on the faith of a night- 
cap and a pipe ; or that he is especially boring, for ev- 
ery American whom one meets whips him easily in 
boredom. It is that he is so nakedly and undisguisedly 
English. We never see Englishmen in England. They 
are too busy, too afraid of Mrs. Grundy, too oppressed 
with duties and responsibilities and insular respectabili- 
ties and home decencies to be really themselves. They 
are forced to dress decently, to restrain their temper, to 
affect a little modesty. There is the pulpit to scold 
them, and the Times to give them something to talk 
about, and an infinite number of grooves and lines and 



214 STRAY STUDIES. 

sidings along which they can be driven in a slow and 
decent fashion, or into which, as a last resort, they can 
be respectably shunted. But grooves and lines end with 
the British Channel. The true Englishman has no awe 
for Galignani ; he has a slight contempt for the Conti- 
nental chaplain. He can wear what hat he likes, show 
what temper he likes, and be himself. It is he whose 
boots tramp along the Boulevards, whose snore thunders 
loudest of all in the night train, who begins his endless 
growl after "a decent dinner" at Basle, and his endless 
contempt for " Swiss stupidity " at Lucerne. We track 
him from hotel to hotel ; we meet him at station after 
station ; we revel in the chase as coat after coat of the 
outer man peels away, and the inner Englishman stands 
more plainly revealed. But it is in the hotels of the 
higher mountains that w T e first catch the man himself. 

There is a sort of snow-line of nations ; and nothing 
amazes one more, in a run through the Alps, than to 
see how true the various peoples among their visitors 
are to their own specific level. As a rule, the French- 
man clings to the road through the passes, the American 
pauses at the end of the mule-track, the German stops 
at the chalet in the pine-forest. It is only at the Alpine 
table-d^/wte, with a proud consciousness of being seven 
thousand feet above the sea-level, that one gets the En- 
glishman pure. It is a very odd sensation, in face of 
the huge mountain-chains, and with the glacier only an 
hour's walk overhead, to find one's self again in a little 



HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS. 215 

England, with the very hotel -keeper greeting one in 
one's native tongue, and the guides exchanging English 
oaths over their Trinkgeld. Cooped up within four walls, 
one gets a better notion of the varieties, the lights and 
shadows, of home life than one gets in Pall Mall. The 
steady old Indian couple, whose climb is so infinitely 
slow and sure ; the Oxford freshman, who comes bloom- 
ing up the hill-side to declare Titiens beautiful, and to 
gusli. over the essays of Frederick Robertson ; the steady 
man of business, who does his Alps every summer; the 
jaded London curate, who lingers, with a look of misery, 
round the stove ; the British mother, silken, severe, im- 
placable as below ; the British maiden, sitting alone in 
the rock-clefts, and reviewing the losses and gains of 
the last season — all these are thrown together in an odd 
jumble of rank and taste by the rain, fog, and snow- 
drift, which form some two -thirds of the pleasures of 
the Alps. But, odd as the jumble is, it illustrates in a 
way that nothing else does some of the characteristics 
of the British nation, and impresses on one in a way 
that one never forgets the real native peculiarities of 
Englishmen. 

In the first place, no scene so perfectly brings out the 
absolute vacuity of the British mind, when one can get 
it free from the replenishing influences of the daily pa- 
per. Alpine talk is the lowest variety of conversation, 
as the common run of Alpine writing is the lowest form 
of literature. It is, in fact, simply drawing-room talk 



216 STRAY STUDIES. 

as drawing-room talk would be, if all news, all scandal, 
all family details, were suddenly cut off. In its way, it 
throws a pleasant light on English education, and on 
the amount of information about other countries which 
it is considered essential to an English gentleman to 
possess. The guardsman swears that the Swiss are an 
uneducated nation, with a charming unconsciousness 
that their school system is without a rival in Europe ; 
the young lady to one's right wonders why such nice 
people should be republicans ; the Cambridge man 
across the table exposes the eccentricity of a friend who 
wished to know in what canton he was traveling; the 
squire with the pi nk-and- white daughters is amazed at 
the absence of police. In the very heart of the noblest 
home of liberty wmich Europe has seen, our astonishing 
nation lives and moves with as contented and self-satis- 
fied an ignorance of the laws, the history, the character 
of the country or its people, as if Switzerland were Tim- 
buctoo. Still, even sublime ignorance such as this is 
better than to listen to the young thing of thirty -five 
summers, with her drivel about William Tell ; and one 
has always the resource of conceiving a Swiss party 
tramping about England with no other notion of En- 
glishmen than that they are extortionate hotel-keepers, 
or of the English Constitution than that it is democratic 
and absurd, or of English history than that Queen Elea- 
nor sucked the poison from her husband's arm. 

The real foe of life over an Alpine table is that 



HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS. 217 

weather -talk, raised to its highest power, which forms 
nine-tenths of the conversation. The beautiful weather 
one had on the Rigi, the execrable weather one had at 
the Furca, the unsettled weather one had on the Lake 
of Thun ; the endless questions whether you have been 
here and whether you have been there ; the long cate- 
chism as to the insect-life and the tariff of the various 
hotels; the statements as to the route by which they 
have come, the equally gratuitous information as to the 
route by which they shall go ; the " oh, so beautiful !" 
of the gusher in ringlets, the lawyer's " decidedly sub- 
lime," the monotonous " grand, grand !" of the man of 
business; the constant asseveration of all, as to every 
prospect which they have visited, that they never have 
seen such a beautiful view in their life — form a cataract 
of boredom which pours down from morn to dewy eve. 
It is in vain that one makes desperate efforts to procure 
relief, that the inventive mind entraps the spinster into 
discussion over ferns, tries the graduate on poetry, be- 
guiles the squire toward politics, lures the Indian officer 
into a dissertation on coolies, leads the British mother 
through flowery paths of piety toward the new vacan- 
cies in the episcopal bench. The British mother re- 
members a bishop whom she met at Lucerne, the Indian 
officer gets back by the Ghauts to the Schreckhorn, the 
graduate finds his way again through "Manfred" to 
the precipices. In an instant the drone recommences, 
the cataract pours down again ; and there is nothing for 
it but to wander out on the terrace of six feet by four, 



218 STRAY STUDIES. 

and wonder what the view would be if there were no 
fog. 

But even a life like this must have its poetry and its 
hero, and at seven thousand feet above the sea -level 
it is very natural to find one's poetry in what would be 
dull enough below. The hero of the Bell Alp or the 
(Eggischorn is, naturally enough, the Alpine Clubbist. 
He has hurried, silent and solitary, through the lower 
country; he only blooms into real life at the sight of 
"high work." It is wonderful how lively the little 
place becomes as he enters it; what a run there is on 
the landlord for information as to his projects; what 
endless consultations of the barometer; what pottering 
over the pages of " Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers." How 
many guides will he take ? has he a dog ? will he use 
the rope ? what places has he done before ? — a thousand 
questions of this sort are buzzing about the room as the 
hero sits quietly down to his dinner. The elderly spin- 
ster remembers the fatal accident of last season, and 
ventures to ask him what preparations he has made for 
the ascent. The hero stops his dinner politely, and 
shows her the new little box of lip -salve with which 
he intends to defy the terrors of the Alps. To say the 
truth, the Alpine climber is not an imaginative man. 
With him the climb which fills every by-stander with 
awe is "a good bit of work, but nothing out of the way, 
you know." He has never done this particular peak, 
and so he has to do it ; but it has been too often done 



HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS. 219 

before, to fill him with any particular interest in the 
matter. As to the ascent itself, he sets about planning 
it as practically as if he were planning a run from Lon- 
don to Lucerne. We see him sitting with his guides, 
marking down the time-table of his route, ascertaining 
the amount of meat and wine which will be required, 
distributing among his followers their fair weights of 
blankets and ropes. Then he tells us the hour at which 
he shall be back to-morrow, and the file of porters set 
off with him, quietly and steadily, up the hill-side. We 
turn out and' give him a cheer as he follows, but the 
thought of the provisions takes a little of the edge off 
our romance. Still, there is a great run that evening 
on " Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers," and a constant little 
buzz round the fortunate person who has found the 
one record of an ascent of this particular peak. 

What is it which makes men in Alpine travel-books 
write as men never write elsewhere? What is the ori- 
gin of a style unique in literature, which misses both 
the sublime and the ridiculous, and constantly hops 
from tall-talk to a mirth feeble and inane? Why is it 
that the senior tutor, who is so hard on a bit of bad 
Latin, plunges at the sight of an Alp into English in- 
conceivable, hideous ? Why does page after page look 
as if it had been dredged with French words through 
a pepper-castor? Why is the sunrise or the scenery al- 
ways " indescribable," while the appetite of the guides 
lends itself to such reiterated description ? These are 



220 STRAY STUDIES. 

questions which suggest themselves to quiet critics, but 
hardly to the group in the hotel. They have found the 
hole where the hero is to snatch a few hours of sleep 
before commencing the ascent. They have followed 
him, in imagination, round the edge of the crevasses. 
All the old awe and terror that disappeared in his pres- 
ence revive at the eloquent description of the arete. 
There is a gloom over us, as we retire to bed and think 
of the little company huddled in their blankets, waiting 
for the dawn. There is a gloom over us at breakfast, 
as the spinster recalls one " dreadful place w T here you 
look down five thousand feet clear." The whole party 
breaks up into little groups, who set out for high points 
from which the first view of the returning hero will be 
caught. Every body comes back certain they have seen 
him, till the landlord pronounces that every body has 
mistaken the direction in which he must come. At 
last there is a distant jodel, and in an hour or so the 
hero arrives. He is impassive and good-humored as 
before. When w r e crowd around him for the tidings of 
peril and adventure, he tells us, as he told us before he 
started, that it is " a good bit of work, but nothing out 
of the way." Pressed by the spinster, he replies, in 
the very w r ords of " Peaks and Passes," that the sunrise 
was " indescribable," and then, like the same inspired 
volume, enlarges freely on the appetite of his guides. 
Then he dines, and then he tells us that w T hat he has 
really gained from his climb is entire faith in the effi- 
cacy of Ins little box for preventing all injury from sun 



HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS. 221 

or from snow. He is a little proud, too, to have done 
the peak in twenty minutes less time than Jones, and 
at ten shillings less cost. Altogether, it must be con- 
fessed, the Alpine Clubbist is not an imaginative man. 
His one grief in life seems to be the failure of his new 
portable cooking apparatus, and he pronounces "Lie- 
big's Extract" to be the great discovery of the age. 
But such as he is, solid, practical, slightly stupid, he is 
the hero of the Alpine hotel. 

At such an elevation the religions development of 
the British mind becomes strangely jerky and irregular. 
The arrival of Sunday is suddenly revealed to the 
group round the breakfast -table by the severity with 
which the spinster's eye is fixed on an announcement 
over the stove that the English service in the hotel is at 
ten o'clock. But the announcement is purely specula- 
tive. The landlord "hopes" there will be service, and 
plunges again into the kitchen. Profane sounds of fid- 
dling and dancing reach the ear from an outbuilding, 
where the guides and the maids are celebrating the day 
by a dance. The spinster is in earnest, but the insu- 
perable difficulty lies in the non-existence of a parson. 
The Indian civilian suggests that we should adopt the 
naval usage, and that the senior layman read prayers. 
But the attorney is the senior layman, and he objects to 
such a muddling of the professions. The young Oxford 
under-graduate tells his little tale of a service on board 
ship, where the major, unversed in such matters, began 



222 STRAY STUDIES. 

with the churching service, and ended with the office 
for the burial of the dead. Then he withers beneath 
the stony stare of the British mother, who is reading 
her "lessons" in the corner. At last there is a little 
buzz of excitement, and every eye is fixed upon the 
quiet -looking traveler in a brown shooting- coat and a 
purple tie, who is chipping his egg, and imbibing his 
coffee in silence and unconsciousness. The spinster is 
sure that the stranger is Mr. Smith. The attorney 
doubts whether such a remarkable preacher would go 
about in such a costume. The British mother solves 
the whole difficulty by walking straight up to him, and 
with an eye on the announcement in question, asking 
point-blank whether she has the pleasure of addressing 
that eminent divine. Smith hesitates, and is lost. His 
egg and coffee disappear. The table is cleared, and the 
chairs arranged with as little regard to comfort as may 
be. The divine retires for the sermon which — prescient 
of his doom — he has slipped into his valise. The land- 
lord produces two hymn-books of perfectly different ori- 
.gins, and some time is spent in finding a hymn which is 
common to both. When the time comes for singing it, 
the landlord joins in with a fine but wandering bass, 
catching an English word here and there as he goes 
along. The sermon is, as usual, on the Prodigal Son, 
and the Indian civilian nods at every mention of "go- 
ing into a far country," as a topic specially appropriate 
for the occasion. But the divine is seen no more. His 
cold becomes rapidly serious, and he takes to his bed at 



HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS. 223 

the very hour of afternoon service. The British maid- 
en wanders out to read Tennyson in the rock-clefts, and 
is wonder-struck to come upon the unhappy sufferer, 
reading Tennyson in the rock-clefts too. After all, bed 
is not good for a cold, and the British Sunday is insuf- 
ferable, and poetry is the expression of the deepest and 
most sacred emotions. This is the development which 
religion takes with a British maiden and a British par- 
son in regions above the clouds. 



MEAS : A VIRGILIAI STUDY. 



15 



I 



MEAS : A VIRGILIAN STUDY. 



In the revival, side by side, of Homeric and Yirgilian 
study, it is easy to see the reflection of two currents 
of contrasted sentiment which are telling on the world 
around us. A cry for simpler living and simpler think- 
ing, a revolt against the social and intellectual perplexi- 
ties in which modern life loses its direct and intensest 
joys, a craving for a world untroubled by the problems 
that weigh on us, express themselves as vividly in poems 
like the "Earthly Paradise" as in the return to the "Il- 
iad." The charm of Virgil, on the other hand, lies in 
the strange fidelity with which, across so many ages, he 
echoes those complex thoughts which make the life of 
our own. Virgil is the Tennyson of the older world. 
His power, like that of the laureate, lies in the sympathy 
with which he reflects the strength and weakness of his- 
time, its humanity, its new sense of human brotherhood, 
its pi tif ulness, its moral earnestness, its high conception 
of the purpose of life and the dignity of man, its atti- 
tude of curious but condescend ino; interest toward the 
past, its vast dreams of a future, embodied by the one 



228 STRAY STUDIES. 

poet in the vague dream-land of "Locksley Hall," by 
the other in the enduring greatness of Rome. 



"O & 



\ Fro 



From beginning to end, the "^Eneid" is a song of 
Rome. Throughout it we feel ourselves drawing nearer 
and nearer to that sense of the Roman greatness which 
tilled the soul of Virgil ; with him, in verse after verse, 
" tendimus in Latium." Nowhere does the song rise to 
a higher grandeur than when the singer sings the majes- 
ty of that all-embracing empire, the wide peace of the 
world beneath its sway. But the ^ JRneid " is no mere 
outburst of Roman pride. To Virgil, the time in which 
he lived was at once an end and a beginning — a close 
of the long struggles which had fitted Rome to be the 
mistress of the world — an opening of her new and 
mightier career as a reconciler and leader of the na- 
tions. His song is broken by divine prophecies, not 
merely of Roman greatness, but of the work Rome had 
to do in warring down the rebels against her universal 
sway, in showing clemency to the conquered, in binding 
hostile peoples together, in welding the nations into a 
new human race. The "^Eneid " is a song of the fut- 
ure rather than of the present or past — a song not of 
pride, but of duty. The work that Rome has done 
points throughout to the nobler work which Rome has 
yet to do. And in the very forefront of this dream of 
the future, Virgil sets the ideal of the new Roman by 
whom this mighty task shall be wrought ; the picture of 
one who, by loyalty to a higher purpose, had fitted him- 



.ENEAS. 229 

self to demand loyalty from those whom he ruled — one 
who, by self-mastery, had learned to be master of men. 

It is this thought of self-mastery which is the key to 
the "JEneid." Filled as he is with a sense of the great- 
ness of Rome, the mood of Virgil seems constantly to 
be fluctuating between a pathetic consciousness of the 
toils and self-devotion, the suffering and woe, that run 
through his national history, and the final greatness 
which they bought. His poem draws both these impres- 
sions together in the figure of ./Eneas. /Eneas is the 
representative of that " piety," that faith in his race and 
in his destiny, which had drawn the Roman from his 
little settlement on the hills beside Tiber to a vast em- 
pire " beyond the Garamantians and the Indians." All 
the endurance, the suffering, the patriotism, the self-de- 
votion of generation after generation, is incarnate in 
him. It is by his mouth that, in the darkest hours of 
national trial, Roman seems to say to Roman, " O passi 
graviora, dabit Dens his quoque finem." It is to this 
" end " that the wanderings of ^Eneas, like the labors of 
consul and dictator, inevitably tend, and it is the firm 
faith in such a close that gives its peculiar character to 
the pathos of the "yEneid." 

'x.Rome is before us throughout, "per tot discrimina 
rerum tendimus in Latium." It is not as a mere tale of 
romance that we follow the wanderings of "the man 
who first came from Trojan shores to Italy." They are 



230 STRAY STUDIES. 

the sacrifice by which the father of the Roman race 
wrought out the greatness of his people, the toils he 
endured "dum conderet urbem." "Italiam qusero pa- 
triam" is the key-note of the "iEneid," but the " Quest" 
of ^Eneas is no self -sought quest of his own. " Italiam 
non sponte sequor," he pleads, as Dido turns from him, 
in the Elysian fields, with eyes of speechless reproach. 
He is the chosen instrument of a divine purpose, work- 
ing out its ends alike across his own bufferings, from 
shore to shore, or the love -tortures of the Phoenician 
queemj The memorable words that JEneas addresses to 
Dares, " Cede Deo " (" bend before a will higher as well 
as stronger than thine own"), are, in fact, the faith of 
his own career. 

But it is in this very submission to the divine order 
that he himself soars into greatness. The figure of the 
warrior who is so insignificant in the Homeric story of 
the fight around Troy, becomes that of a hero in the 
horror of its capture. yEneas comes before us the sur- 
vivor of an immense fall, sad with the sadness of lost 
home and slaughtered friends ; not even suffered to fall 
amidst the wreck, but driven forth by voices of the 
Fates to new toils and a distant glory. He may not 
die ; his " moriamur " is answered by the reiterated " De- 
part" of the gods, the "Heu, f uge !" of the shade of 
Hector. The vision of the great circle of the gods fight- 
ing against Troy drives him forth in despair to a life of 
exile, antlfthe carelessness of despair is over him, as he 
• 



-(ENEAS. 231 

drifts from land to land. " Sail where you will," he 
cries to his pilot ; " one land is as good as another, now 
Troy is gone." More and more, indeed, as he wanders, 
he recognizes himself as the agent of a divine purpose, 
but all personal joy in life has fled. Like Dante, he 
feels the bitterness of exile : how hard it is to climb an- 
other's stairs, how bitter to eat is another's bread. Here 
and there he meets waifs and strays of the great wreck, 
fugitives like himself, but who have found a refuge and 
a new Troy on foreign shores. Pie greets them, but he 
may not stay. At last the \ery gods themselves seem to 
give him the passionate love of Dido, but again the fatal 
" Depart" tears him from her arms. The chivalrous love 
of Pallas casts for a moment its light and glory round 
his life, but the light and glo ry si nk into gloom again be- 
neath the spear of Turnus. /! ^Eneas is left alone with his 
destiny to the very end, but it is a destiny that has grown 
into a passion that absorbs the very life of the mam] 

" Italiam magnam Grynasus Apollo, 
Italiam Lycise jussere capessere sortes. 
Hie amor, hcec patria est!" 

It is in the hero of the " Idylls," and not in the hero 
of the " Iliad," that we find the key to such a character 
as this. So far is Virgil from being the mere imitator 
of Homer that, in spite of his close and loving study of 
the older poem, its temper seems to have roused him 
only to poetic protest. He recoils from the vast person- 
ality of Achilles, from that incarnate " wrath," heedless 
of divine purposes, measuring itself, boldl^^ith the 



232 STRAY STUDIES. 

gods, careless as a god of the fate and fortunes of men. 
1 In the face of this destroyer the Roman poet sets a 
\ founder of cities and peoples, self - forgetful, patient, 
\ loyal to a divine aim; calm with a Roman calmness, 
Wet touched as no Roman had hitherto been touched 
with pity and tenderness for the sorrows of men. The 
one poem is a song of passion, a mighty triumph of the 
individual man, a poem of human energy in defiant iso- 
lation. The other is an epic of social order, of a divine 
law manifesting itself in the fortunes of the world, of 
the bonds which link man to his fellow-men ; a song of 
duty, of self-sacrifice, of reverence, of " piety." 

It is in realizing the temper of the poem that we real- 
ize the temper of its hero. ^Eneas is the Arthur of the 
Virgilian epic, with the same absorption of all individ- 
uality in the nobleness of his purpose, the same under- 
tone of melancholy, the same unearthly vagueness of 
outline, and remoteness from the meaner interests and 
passions of men. As the poet of our own day has em- 
bodied his ideal of manhood in the king, so Virgil has 
embodied it in the hero-founder of his race. The tem- 
per of iEneas is the highest conception of human char- 
acter to which the Old World ever attained. The virt- 
ues of the Homeric combatants are there : courage, en- 
durance, wisdom in council, eloquence, chivalrous friend- 
ship, family affection, faith to plighted word ; but with 
these mingle virtues unknown to Hector or Achilles — 
temperance, self-control, nobleness and unselfishness of 



-ENEAS. 233 

aim, loyalty to an inner sense of right, the piety of self- 
devotion and self-sacrifice, refinement of feeling, a pure 
and delicate sense of the sweetness of woman's love, 
pity for the fallen and the weak. 

In the Homeric picture, Achilles sits solitary in his 
tent, bound, as it were, to the affections of earth by the 
one tie of his friendship for Patroclus. No figure has 
ever been painted by a poet's pen more terrible in the 
loneliness of its wrath, its sorrow, its revenge ; but, from 
one end of his song to the other, Virgil has surrounded 
./Eneas with the ties and affections of home. In the aw- 
ful night with which his story opens, the loss of Creusa, 
the mocking embrace in which the dead wife flies from 
his arms, form his farewell to Troy. " Thrice strove I 
there to clasp my arms about her neck" — every one 
knows the famous lines : 

"Thrice I essayed her neck to clasp, 
Thrice the vain semblance mocked my grasp, 
As wind or slumber light." 

Amidst all the terror of the flight from the burning 
city, the figure of his child starts out bright against the 
darkness, touched with a tenderness which Virgil seems 
to reserve for his child-pictures* But the whole escape 

* "Bextrae se parvus lulus 
Implicuit, sequiturque patrem non passibus asquis." 
; ' His steps scarce matching with my stride." 
Mr. Conington's translation hardly renders the fond little touch of the 
Virgilian phrase, a phrase only possible to a lover of children. 



234 STEAY STUDIES. 

is the escape of a family. Not merely child and wife, 
but father and household accompany ^Eneas. Life, he 
tells them when they bid him leave them to their fate, 
is worthless without them : and the " commune peri- 
clum, una salus" runs throughout all his wanderings. 
The common love of his boy is one of the bonds that 
link Dido with ^Eneas, and a yet more exquisite touch 
of poetic tenderness makes his affection for Ascauius 
the one final motive for his severance from the queen. 
Not merely the will of the gods drives him from Car- 
thage, but the sense of the wrong done to his boy.* 
His friendship is as warm and constant as his love for 
father or child. At the two great crises of his life the 
thought of Hector stirs a new outpouring of passionate 
regret. It is the vision of Hector which rouses him 
from the slumber of the terrible night when Troy is 
taken ; the vision of the hero not as glorified by death, 
but as the memory of that last pitiful sight of the 
corpse, dragged at the chariot -wheels of Achilles, had 
stamped it forever on the mind of his friend. It is as 
though all recollection of his greatness had been blotted 
out by the shame and terror of his fall (" quantum mii- 
tatus ab illo Hectore !") ; but the gory hair and the 
mangled form only quicken the passionate longing of 
.Eiieas.t The tears, the "mighty groan," burst forth 

* li Me pner Ascnnius, capitisqne injuria can, 

Quem regno Hesperite fraud o et fatalibus arvis." 

t "Quibus Hector ab oris 
Expectate venis?'' 



.ENEAS. 235 

again as, in the tapestry of the Sidonian temple, he sees 
pictured anew the story of Hector's fall. In the hour 
of his last combat the thought of his brother in arms re- 
turns to him, and the memory of Hector is the spur to 
nobleness and valor which he bequeaths to his boy. 

But throughout it is this refinement of feeling, this 
tenderness and sensitiveness to affection, that Virgil has 
loved to paint in the character of iEneas. To him 
Dido's charm lies in her being the one pitying face that 
has as yet met his own. Divine as he is, the child, like 
Achilles, of a goddess, he broods with a tender melan- 
choly over the sorrows of his fellow-men. "Sunt la- 
crymse rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt,"-are words 
in which Sainte - Beuve has found the secret of the 
"JSneid ;" they are, at any rate, the key to the charac- 
ter of yEneas. Like the poet of our own days, he longs 
for " the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a 
voice that is still."* He stands utterly apart from those 
epical heroes "that delight in war." The joy in sheer 
downright fighting which rings through Homer is whol- 
ly absent from the "^Eneid." Stirring and picturesque 
as is " The Gathering of the Latin Clans," brilliant as is 
the painting of the last combat with Turnus, we feel 
everywhere the touch of a poet of peace. Nothing is 
more noteworthy than the careful exclusion of the Bo- 



* "Cur dextrre jungere dextram 
Non datur. ac veras audire et reddere voces ?" 



236 STKAY STUDIES. 

man cruelty, the Roman ambition, from the portrait of 
iEneas. Virgil seems to protest in his very hero against 
the poetic compulsion that drags him to the battle-field. 
On the eve of his final triumph, ^Eneas 

" Incusat voce Latinum ; 
Testaturque deos iterum se ad prcelia cogi." 

Even when host is marshaled against host, the thought 
of reconciliation is always kept steadily to the front, 
and the bitter cry of the hero asks, in the very hour of 
the combat, why bloodshed should divide peoples who 
are destined to be one. 

It is the conflict of these two sides of the character 
of JEneas, the struggle between this sensitiveness to af- 
fection and his entire absorption in the mysterious des- 
tiny to which he is called, between his clinging to hu- 
man ties and his readiness to forsake all and follow the 
divine voice which summons him, the strife, in a word, 
between love and duty, which gives its meaning and 
pathos to the story of ^Eneas and Dido. Attractive as 
it undoubtedly is, the story of Dido is, in the minds of 
nine modern readers out of ten, fatal to the effect of 
the "iEneid " as a whole. The very beauty of the tale 
is partly the cause of this. To the school-boy, and to 
thousands who are school- boys no longer, the poem is 
nothing more than the love-story of the Trojan leader 
and the Tyrian queen. Its human interest ends with 
the funeral fires of Dido, and the books which follow 



^ENEAS. 237 

are read merely as ingenious displays of the philosophic 
learning, the antiquarian research, and the patriotism of 
Virgil. But the story is yet more directly fatal in the 
way in which it cuts off the hero himself from modern 
sympathies. His desertion of Dido makes, it has heen 
said, " an irredeemable poltroon of him in all honest 
English eyes." Dryden can only save his character by 
a jest, and Rousseau damns it with an epigram. Mr. 
Keble supposes that in the interview among the Shades 
the poet himself intended the abasement of his hero, 
and Mr. Gladstone has capped this by a theory that 
Virgil meant to draw his readers' admiration, not to 
JEneas, but to Turnus. 

It was wiser, perhaps, to turn from the impressions of 
Virgil's critics to the impression which the story must 
have left in the mind of Virgil himself. It is surely 
needless to assume that the first of poetic artists has 
forgotten the very rudiments of his art, in placing at the 
opening of his song a figure which strips all interest 
from his hero. Nor is it needful to believe that such a 
blunder has been unconscious, and that Virgil has had 
to learn the true effect of his episode on the general 
texture of his poem from the reader of to-day. The 
poet who paints for us the character of Dido must have 
felt, ere he could have painted it, that charm which has 
ever since bewitched the world. Every nerve in Virgil 
must have thrilled at the consummate beauty of this 
woman of his own creation, her self-abandonment, her 



238 STEAY STUDIES. 

love, her suffering, her despair. * If he deliberately uses 
her simply as a foil to the character of ^Eneas, it is with 
a perception of this charm infinitely deeper and tenderer 
than ours. But he does use her as a foil. Impulse, pas- 
sion, the mighty energies of unbridled will, are wrought 
up into a figure of unequaled beauty, and then set against 
the true manhood of the founder and type of Koine, the 
manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, of self-control. 

To the stoicism of Virgil, steadied by a high sense of 
man's worth and work in the world, braced to patience 
and endurance for noble ends, passion — the revolt of 
the individual self against the world's order — seemed a 
light and trivial thing. He could feel and paint with 
exquisite delicacy and fire the charm of woman's utter 
love ; but woman, with all her loveliness, wanted, to him, 
the grandeur of man's higher constancy to an unselfish 
purpose, " varium et mutabile semper fcemina." Pas- 
sion, on the other hand, is the mainspring of modem 
poetry, and it is difficult for us to realize the superior 
beauty of the calmer and vaster ideal of the poets of 
old. The figure of Dido, whirled hither and thither 
by the storms of warring emotions, reft even of her 
queenly dignity by the despair of her love, degraded 
by jealousy and disappointment to a very scold, is to 
the calm, serene figure of ^Eneas, as modern sculpture, 
the sculpture of emotion, is to the sculpture of classic 
art. Each, no doubt, has its own peculiar beauty, and 
the work of a true criticism is to view either from its 



JENEA&. 239 

own stand-point, and not from the stand-point of its 
rival. But if we would enter into the mind of Virgil, 
we must view Dido with the eyes of ./Eneas, and not 
iEneas with the eyes of Dido. 

When Virgil first sets the two figures before us, it is 
not on the contrast, but on the unity, of their temper and 
history that he dwells. Touch after touch brings out 
this oneness of mood and aim as they drift toward one 
another. The same weariness, the same unconscious 
longing for rest and love, fills either heart. It is as a 
queen, as a Dian overtopping her nymphs by the head, 
that Dido appears on the scene, distributing their task 
to her laborers as a Boman Cornelia distributed wool 
to her house -slaves, questioning the Trojan strangers 
who sought her hospitality and protection. It is with 
the brief, haughty tone of a ruler of men that she bids 
them lay by their fears and assures them of shelter. 
Around her is the hum and stir of the city-building, a 
scene in which the sharp, precise touches of Virgil be- 
tray the hand of the town poet. But within is the lone- 
ly heart of a woman. Dido, like ^Eneas, is a fugitive, 
an exile of bitter, vain regrets. Her husband, "loved 
with a mighty love," has fallen by a brother's hand ; 
and his ghost, like that of Creusa, has driven her in 
flight from her Tyrian father -land. Like ^Eneas, too, 
she is no solitary wanderer; she guides a new colony to 
the site of the future Carthage, as he to the site of the 
future Borne. When ^Eneas stands before her, it is as 



2-iO STRAY STUDIES. 

a wanderer like herself. His heart is bleeding at the 
loss of Creusa, of Helen, of Troy. He is solitary, in his 
despair. He is longing for the touch of a human hand, 
the sound of a voice of love. He is weary of being baf- 
fled by the ghostly embraces of his wife, by the cloud 
that wraps his mother from his view. He is weary of 
wandering, longing with all the old-world intensity of 
longing for a settled home. " O fortunati quorum jam 
moenia surgunt," he cries, as he looks on the rising walls 
of Carthage. His gloom has been lightened, indeed, by 
the assurance of his fame, which he gathers from the 
pictures of the great Defense graven on the walls of 
the Tyrian temple. But the loneliness and longing still 
press heavily on him, when the cloud which has wrapped 
him from sight parts suddenly asunder, and Dido and 
^Eneas stand face to face. 

Few situations in poetry are more artistic than this 
meeting of ^Eneas and the queen, in its suddenness and 
picturesqueness. A love born of pity speaks in the first 
words of the hero,* and the reply of Dido strikes the 
same sympathetic note.f But the fervor of passion is 
soon to supersede this compassionate regard. Love him- 
self, in the most exquisite episode of the "yEneid," takes 
the place of Ascanius: while the Trojan boy lies sleep- 
ing on Ida, lapped on Earth's bosom beneath the cool 

* " O sola infandos Trojai miserata labores." 
f "Non ignara mali, misevis succuiTere disco." 



^NEAS. 241 

mountain shade, his divine "double" lies clasped to 
Dido's breast, and pours his fiery longings into her heart. 
Slowly, unconsciously, the lovers draw together. The 
gratitude of ^Eneas is still at first subordinate to his 
quest. " Thy name and praise shall live," he says to 
Dido, "whatever lands call me." In the same way, 
though the queen's generosity has shown itself in her 
first offer to the sailors ("Urbem qnam statuo vestra 
est "), it is still generosity, and not passion. Passion is 
born in the long night through which, with Eros still 
folded in her arms, Dido listens to the " Tale of Troy." 

The very verse quickens with the new pulse of love. 
The preface of the ".ZEneid," the stately introduction 
that foretells the destinies of Borne, and the divine end 
to which the fates were guiding xEneas, closes, in fact, 
with the appearance of Dido. The poem takes a gayer 
and lighter tone. The disguise and recognition of Ve- 
nus as she appears to her son, the busy scene of city- 
building, the sudden revelation of xEneas to the queen, 
have the note of exquisite romance. The honey-sweet 
of the lover's tale, to use the poet's own simile,* steals 
subtly on the graver epic. Step by step, Virgil leads us 
on through every stage of pity, of fancy, of reverie, of 
restlessness, of passion, to the fatal close. None before 
him had painted the thousand delicate shades of love's 
advance; none has painted them more tenderly, more 



* "Fervet opus, redolentque thymo fragrantia mella. 

16 



242 STRAY STUDIES. 

exquisitely since. As the queen listens to the tale of 
her lover's escape, she showers her questions as one that 
could never know enough. 

"Multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hectore multa." 

Her passion feeds through sleepless nights on the recol- 
lection of his look, on the memory of his lightest words. 
Even the old love of Sychseus seems to revive in and 
blend with this new affection.* Her very queenliness 
delights to idealize her lover, to recognize in the hero 
before whom she falls " one of the race of the gods." 
For a while the figure of Dido is that of happy, insa- 
tiate passion. The rumors of war from the jealous 
chieftains about her fall idly on her ear. She hovers 
round her hero with sweet observances of love; she 
hangs at his side the jeweled sword, and the robe of 
Tyrian purple woven by her queenly hands. 

But even in the happiest moments of his story the 
consummate art of the poet has prepared for the final 
catastrophe. Little words, like " misera," "infelix," " fati 
nescia," sound the first under-tones of a woe to come, 
even amidst the joy of the first meeting or the glad tu- 
mult of the hunting-scene. The restlessness, the quick 
alternations of feeling in the hour of Dido's triumph, 
prepare us for the wild swaying of the soul from bitter- 
est hate to pitiful affection in the hour of her agony. 

* " Agnosco veteris vestigia flammav' 



-ENEAS. 243 

She is the first, in the sensitiveness of her passion, to 
catch the change in ^Eneas, and the storm of her indig- 
nation sweeps away the excuses of her lover, as the 
storm of her love had swept away his earlier resolve. 
All dignity, all queenliness breaks before the " f my of 
a woman scorned." She dashes herself against the root- 
ed purpose of ^Eneas as the storm -winds, to use Vir- 
gil's image, dash themselves from this quarter and that 
against the rooted oak. The madness of her failure 
drives her through the streets like a Msenad in the 
nightly orgies of Cithseron ; she flies at last to her cham- 
ber like a beast at bay, and gazes out, distracted, at the 
Trojan shipmen putting off busily from the shores. Yet 
ever and again the wild frenzy -bursts are broken by 
notes of the old pathetic tenderness. In the midst of 
her taunts and menaces she turns, with a woman's deli- 
cacy, to protest against her own violence.: "Heu, furiis 
incensa feror !" She humbles herself even to pray for 
a little respite, if but for a few hours.* She pleads her 
very loneliness ; she catches, as it were, from ^Eneas the 
thought of the boy whose future he had pleaded as one 
cause of his departure, and finds in it a plea for pity. 

Sometimes her agony is too terrible for speech ; she 
can only answer with those "speechless eyes" with 
which her shade was once more to meet iEneas in the 



* "Tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque furori, 
Dnm mea me victam doceat fortuna dolere." 



244 STRAY STUDIES. 

Elysian fields. But her wonderful energy forbids her 
to lie, like weaker women, crushed in her despair. She 
hurries her sister to the feet of her lover, that nothing 
may be left untried. From the first she stakes her life 
on the issue ; it is as one " about to die " that she prays 
iEneas not to leave her. When all has failed, and hope 
itself deserts her, the weariness of life gathers round, 
and she " tires of the sight of day." 

Never have the mighty energies of unbridled human 
will been wrought up into a form of more surpassing 
beauty; never have they been set more boldly and 
sharply against the manhood of duty, of self-sacrifice, 
of self-control. If the tide of Dido's passion sweeps 
away for the moment the consciousness of a divine mis- 
sion which has borne ^Eneas to the Tyrian shore, the 
consciousness lies still in the very heart of the man, and 
revives at the new call of the gods. The call bids him 
depart at once, and without a struggle he " burns to de- 
part." He stamps down and hides within the deep re- 
cesses of his heart the " care " that the wild entreaties 
of the woman he loved arouse within him ; the life that 
had swung for an hour out of its course retains to its old 
bearings ; once more Italy and his destiny become aim 
and father-land : " Hie amor, ha^c patria est." ^Eneas 
bows to the higher will, and from that moment all that 
has turned him from his course is of the past. Dido be- 
comes a part of his memory as of the things that were.* 

* "Nee me neminisse pigebit Elissce." 



.ENEAS. 245 

iEneas is as " resolute to depart " as Dido is " resolute 
to die." And in both the resolve lifts the soul out of 
its lower passion-life into a nobler air. The queen rises 
into her old queenliness as she passes " majestic to the 
grave ;" and her last curse, as the Tyrian ships quit her 
shore, is no longer the wild imprecation of a frenzied 
woman ; it is the mighty curse of the founder of a peo- 
ple calling down on the Roman race ages of inextin- 
guishable hate. "Fight shore w T ith shore; fight sea, 
with sea !" is the prophecy of that struggle with Car- 
thage which all but wrecked for a moment the destinies 
of Rome. But Virgil saw in the character of Dido her- 
self a danger to Rome's future far greater than the 
sword of Hannibal. His very sense of the grandeur of 
Rome's destinies frees him from the vulgar self-confi- 
dence of meaner men. Throughout his poem he is 
haunted by the memories of civil war, by the sense of 
instability which clings to men who have grown up in 
the midst of revolutions. The grandest picture in the 
"^Eneid" reflects the terror of that hour of suspense 
when the galleys of Augustus jostled against the galleys 
of Antony. From that moment, as Virgil's prescience 
foresaw, the dangers of Rome were to spring from a 
single source. Passion, greed, lawless self-seeking, per- 
sonal ambition, the decay of the older Roman sense of 
unselfish duty, of that " pietas " which subordinated the 
interest of the individual man to the common interest 
of the State, this was henceforth to be the real enemy 
of Rome. More and more, as the Roman peace drew 



24:6 STRAY STUDIES. 

the world together, the temper of the East, the temper 
which Yirgil has embodied in his sketch of Dido, would 
tell, and tell fatally, on the temper of the West. Oron- 
tes — to borrow Juvenal's phrase — was already flowing 
into Tiber, and the sterner virtues of the conquerors 
were growing hourly more distasteful beside the variety, 
the geniality, the passionate flush and impulse of the 
conquered. 

It was their common sense of this danger which 
drew together Yirgil and the emperor. It is easy to 
see throughout his poem what critics are accustomed 
to style a compliment to Augustus. But the loving 
admiration and reverence of Yirgil had no need to 
stoop to the flattery of compliment. To him Augustus 
was in a deep and true sense the realization of that 
ideal Roman whom his song was meant to set in the 
forefront of Rome. When Antony, in the madness 
of his enchantment, forgot the high mission to which 
Rome was called, the spell had only been broken by 
the colder " piety" of Caesar. To Yirgil, Augustus was 
the founder of a new Rome, the ^Eneas who, after long 
wanderings across the strife of civil war, had brought 
her into quiet waters, and bound warring factions into 
a peaceful people. Yirgil felt, as even we can feel so 
many ages later, the sense of a high mission, the calm, 
silent recognition of a vast work to be done, which lift- 
ed the cold, passionless imperator into greatness. It 
was the bidding of Augustus that had called him from 



-Eneas. 247 

his "rustic measure" to this song of Rome, and the 
thought of Augustus blended, whether he would or not, 
with that Rome of the future which seemed growing up 
under his hands. Unlike, too, as Virgil was to the em- 
peror, there was a common under -tone of melancholy 
that drew the two men together. The wreck of the 
older faiths, the lingering doubt whether good was, after 
all, the strongest thing in the world, whether " the gods " 
were always on the side of justice and right, throws 
its gloom over the noblest passages of the "^Eneid." 
It is the same doubt, hardened by the temper of the 
man into a colder and more mocking skepticism, that 
sounds in the " plaudite et valete " of the death-bed of 
Augustus. The emperor had played his part well, but 
it was a part that he could hardly persuade himself was 
real. All that wisdom and power could do had been 
done, but Augustus had no faith in the great fabric he 
had reared. Virgil drew faith in the fortunes of Rome 
from his own enthusiasm ; but to him, too, the moral 
order of the world brought only the melancholy doubt 
of Hamlet. Everywhere we feel " the pity on't." The 
religious theory of the universe, the order of the world 
around him, jars at every step with his moral faith. 
JEneas is the reflection of a time out of joint. Every- 
where among good men there was the same moral 
earnestness, the same stern resolve after nobleness and 
grandeur of life, and everywhere there was the same 
inability to harmonize this moral life with the experi- 
ence of the world. 



248 STRAY STUDIES. 

A noble stoicism breathes in the character of ^Eneas : 
the virtue of the virtuous man, refined and softened by 
a poet's pitif ulness, heightened above all by the linger- 
ing doubt whether there were any necessary connection 
between virtue and the divine order of things around it. 

"Di tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid 
Usquam Justitia est et mens sibi conscia recti, 
Prsemia digna ferant !" 

The words glow, so to speak, with moral earnestness ; 
but through them we feel the doubt whether, after all, 
uprightness and a good conscience were really the ob- 
ject of a divine care. Heaven had flown farther off 
from earth than in the days of the " Iliad." The laws 
of the universe, as time had revealed them, the current 
of human affairs, the very might of the colossal empire 
in which the world of civilization found itself prisoned, 
all seemed to be dwarfing man. Man remained, the 
sad, stern manhood of the Stoic, the spirit that breathes 
through the character of ./Eneas, enduring, baffled, yet 
full of a faith that the very storms that drove him from 
sea to sea were workine* out some mysterious and divine 
order. Man was greater than his fate : 

"Quo fata trnhunt retrahuntque sequamur, 
Quicquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est." 

There is the same sad Cato-like stoicism in the words 
with which ^Eneas addresses himself to his final com- 
bat: 



-ENEAS. 249 

"Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem, 
Fortunam ex aliis." 

But the " dis aliter visum " meets us at every step. 
Ripheus is the most just and upright among the war- 
riors of Troy, but he is the first to fall. An inscrutable 
mystery hangs around the order of the world. Men 
of harder, colder temper shrug their shoulders, and, 
like Augustus, repeat their " vanitas vanitatum " with 
a smile of contempt at the fools who take life in ear- 
nest. Nobler and more sensitive souls like that of Vir- 
gil carry about w T ith them " the pity on't." It is this 
melancholy that flings its sad grace over the verse of 
the "^Eneid." We close it, as we close the " Idylls," with 
the king's mournful cry in our ears. But the Roman 
stoicism is of harder and manlier stuff than the chiv- 
alrous spiritualism of Arthur. The ideal of the Old 
World is of nobler, sterner tone than the ideal of the 
New. Even with death and ruin around him, and the 
mystery of the world darkening his soul, man remains 
man, and master of his fate. The suffering and woe of 
the individual find amends in the greatness and welfare 
of the race. We pity the wandering of ^Eneas, but 
his wanderings found the city. The dream of Arthur 
vanishes, as the dark boat dies into a dot upon the mere : 
the dream of iEneas becomes Rome. 



TWO VENETIAN STUDIES. 



TWO VENETIAN STUDIES. 



VENICE AND ROME. 



It is the strangeness and completeness of the contrast 
which make one's first row from Venice to Torcello so 
hard to forget. Behind us the great city sinks slowly 
into a low line of domes and towers; around us, dotted 
here and there over the gleaming surface, are the 
orange sails of trailing market-boats ; we skirt the great 
hay-barges of Mazorbo, whose boatmen bandy lazzi and 
badinage with our gondolier ; we glide by a lonely cy- 
press into a broader reach, and in front, across a waste 
of brown sedge and brush-wood, the tower of Torcello 
rises sharply against the sky. There is something weird 
and unearthly in the suddenness with which one passes 
from the bright, luminous waters of the lagoon, barred 
with soft lines of violet light and broken with reflec- 
tions of wall and bell-tower, into this presence of deso- 
lation and death. A whole world seems to part those 
dreary flats broken with lifeless inlets, those patches of 
sodden fields flung shapelessly among sheets of sullen 



254 STRAY STUDIES. 

water, from the life and joy of the Grand Canal. And 
yet, really to understand the origin of Venice, those 
ages of terror and flight and exile in which the repub- 
lic took its birth, we must study them at Torcello. It 
was from the vast Alpine chain, which hangs in the haze 
of midday like a long dim cloud-line to the north, that 
the hordes of Hun and Goth burst on the Roman world. 
Their path lay along the coast, trending round to the 
west, where, lost among little villages that stand out 
white in the distant shadow, lie the sites of Heraclea 
and Altinum. Across these gray shallows, cut by the 
blue serpentine windings of deeper channels, the Ro- 
mans of the older province of Venetia on the main-land 
fled before Attila or Theodoric or Alboin, to found the 
new Yenetia of the lagoon. Eastward, over Lido, the 
glimmer of the Adriatic recalls the long centuries of 
the Pirate War, that struggle for life which shaped into 
their after-form the government and destinies of the in- 
fant State. Venice itself, the crown and end of strug- 
gle and of flight, lies, over shining miles of water, to the 
south. But it is here that one can best study the story 
of its birth ; it is easier to realize those centuries of ex- 
ile and buffeting for life amidst the dreary flats, the soli- 
tude, the poverty of Torcello, than beneath the gleaming 
front of the Ducal Palace or the mosaics of St. Mark. 

Here, in fact, lies the secret of Venetian history, the 
one key by which it is possible to understand the strange 
riddle of the republic. For thirteen centuries Venice 



VENICE AND ROME. 255 

lay moored, as it were, off the coast of Western Europe, 
without political analogue or social parallel. Its patri- 
ciate, its people, its government, were not what govern- 
ment or people or patriciate were in other countries of 
Western Christendom. The difference lay not in any 
peculiar institutions which it had developed, or in any 
novel form of social or administrative order which it 
had invented, but in the very origin of the State itself. 
We see this the better if we turn from Venice to our 
own homeland. The same age saw the birth of the two 
great maritime powers of modern Europe ; for the set- 
tlements of the English in Britain cover the same cent- 
ury with those of the Roman exiles in the Venetian la- 
goon. But the English colonization was the establish- 
ment of a purely Teutonic state on the wreck of Rome, 
while the Venetian was the establishment of a purely 
Roman state in the face of the Teuton. Venice, in its 
origin, was simply the imperial province of Venetia 
floated across to the islands of the shore. Before the 
successive waves of the Northern inroad, the citizens of 
the coast fled to the sand-banks which had long served 
them as gardens or merchant-ports. The " Chair of At- 
tila," the rough stone seat beside the Church of San 
Fosco, preserves the memory of one destroyer before 
whom a third part of the people of Altinum fled to 
Torcello and the islands around. Their city — even ma- 
terially — passed with them. The new houses were built 
from the ruins of the old. The very stones of Altinum 
served for the " New Altinum " which arose on the des- 



256 STKAY STUDIES. 

olate isle, and inscriptions, pillars, capitals came, in the 
track of the exiles across the lagoon, to be worked into 
the fabric of its cathedral. 

Neither citizens nor city was changed even in name. 
They had put out, for security, a few miles to sea, but 
the sand-banks on which they landed were still Yenetia. 
The fugitive patricians were neither more nor less citi- 
zens of the imperial province because they had fled 
from Padua or Altinum to Malamocco or Torcello. 
Their political allegiance was still due to the Empire. 
Their social organization remained unaffected by the 
flight. So far were they from being severed from 
Borne, so far from entertaining any dreams of starting 
afresh in the "new democracy" which exists in the 
imagination of Darn and his followers, that the one 
boast of their annalists is that they are more Roman 
than the Romans themselves. Their nobles looked 
with contempt on the barbaric blood which had tainted 
that of the Colonnas or the Orsini ; nor did any Isauri- 
an peasant ever break the Roman line of doges as Leo 
broke the line of Roman emperors. Venice — as she 
proudly styled herself in after-time — was " the legiti- 
mate daughter of Rome." The strip of sea-board from 
the Brenta to the Isonzo was the one spot in the Em- 
pire, from the Caspian to the Atlantic, where foot of 
barbarian never trod. And as it rose, so it set. From 
that older world of which it was a part, the history of 
Venice stretched on to the French Revolution, untouch- 



VENICE AND ROME. 257 

ed by Teutonic influences. The old Eoman life, which 
became strange even to the Capitol, lingered, unaltered, 
unimpaired, beside the palace of the duke. The strange 
ducal cap, the red ducal slippers, the fan of bright 
feathers borne before the ducal chair, all came un- 
changed from ages when they were the distinctions of 
every great officer of the Imperial State. It is startling 
to think that almost within the memory of living men 
Venice brought Rome — the Rome of Ambrose and 
Theodosius — to the very doors of the Western world; 
that the living and unchanged tradition of the Empire 
passed away only with the last of the doges. Only on 
the tomb of Manin could men write truthfully, " Hie 
jacet ultimus Romanorum." 

It is this simple continuance of the old social organi- 
zation, which the barbarians elsewhere overthrew, that 
explains the peculiar character of the Venetian patri- 
ciate. In all other countries of the West, the new feud- 
al aristocracy sprung from the Teutonic invaders. In 
Italy itself, the nobles were descendants of Lombard 
conquerors, or of the barons who followed emperor after 
emperor across the Alps. Even when their names and 
characters had alike been molded into Southern form, 
the " Seven Houses " of Pisa boasted of their descent 
from the seven barons of Emperor Otto. But the older 
genealogies of the senators, whose names stood written 
in the Golden Book of Venice, ran, truly or falsely, not 
to Teutonic, but to Roman origins. The Participazii, 

17 



258 STRAY STUDIES. 

the Dandoli, the Falieri, the Foscari, told of the flight 
of their Roman fathers before the barbarian sword 
from Pa via, Gaeta, Fano, Messina. Every quarter of 
Italy had given its exiles, but, above all, the coast round 
the head of the Gulf from Ravenna to Trieste. It was 
especially a flight and settlement of nobles. As soon as 
the barbaric hordes had swept away to the South, the 
farmer or the peasant would creep back to his fields 
and his cabin, and submit to the German master whom 
the conquest had left behind it. But the patrician had 
filled too great a place in the old social order to stoop 
easily to the new. He remained camped as before in 
his island -refuge, among a crowd of dependents, his 
fishermen, his dock-laborers. Throughout the long ages 
which followed, this original form of Venetian society 
remained unchanged. The populace of dependents nev- 
er grew into a people. To the last, fisherman and gon- 
dolier clung to the great houses of which they were the 
clients, as the fishers of Torcello had clung to the great 
nobles of Altinum. No difference of tradition or lan- 
guage or blood parted them. Tradition, on the contra- 
ry, bound them together. No democratic agitator could 
appeal from the present to the past, as Rienzi invoked 
the memories of the Tribunate against the feudal tyr- 
anny of the Colonnas. In Venice the past and pres- 
ent were one. The patrician of Venice simply gov- 
erned the State as his fathers, the curials of Padua 
or Aquileia, had governed the State ten centuries be- 
fore him. 



VENICE AND EOME. 259 

It is this unity of Venetian society which makes 
Venetian history so unlike the history of other Italian 
towns, and to which Venice owes the peculiar pictur- 
esqueness and brightness which charm us still in its de- 
cay. Elsewhere the history of mediaeval Italy sprung 
from the difference of race and tradition between con- 
quered and conquerors, between Lombard noble and 
Italian serf. The communal revolt of the twelfth 
century, the democratic constitutions of Milan or of 
Bologna, were in effect a rising of race against race, 
the awakening of a new people in the effort to throw 
off the yoke of the stranger. The huge embattled piles 
which flung their dark shadows over the streets of 
Florence tell of the ceaseless war between baronage 
and people. The famous penalty by which some of 
the democratic communes condemned a recreant cob- 
bler or tinker to "descend," as his worst punishment, 
" into the order of the noblesse" tells of the hate and 
issue of the struggle between them. But no trace of 
struggle or of hate breaks the annals of Venice. There 
is no people, no democratic Broletto, no Hall of the 
Commune. ^And as there was no "people," so in the 
mediaeval sense of the word there was no " baronage." 
The nobles of Venice were not Lombard barons, but 
Roman patricians, untouched by feudal traditions, or 
by the strong instinct of personal independence which 
created feudalism. The shadow of the Empire is al- 
ways over them ; they look for greatness not to inde- 
pendent power or strife, but to joint co-operation in 



260 STRAY STUDIES. 

the government of the State. Their instinct is admin- 
istrative ; they shrink from disorder as from a barbaric 
thing ; they are citizens, and nobles only because they 
are citizens. Of this political attitude of its patricians, 
Venice is itself the type. The palaces of Torcello or 
Rialto were houses not of war but of peace ; no dark 
masses of tower and wall, but bright with marbles and 
frescoes, and broken with arcades of fretted masonry. 

Yenice, in a word, to her very close was a city of 
nobles, the one place in the modern world where the 
old senatorial houses of the fifth century lived and 
ruled as of old. But it was a city of Roman nobles. 
Like the Teutonic passion for war, the Teutonic scorn 
of commerce was strange and unknown to the curial 
houses of the Italian municipalities, as it had been 
strange and unknown to the greatest houses of Rome. 
The senator of Padua or Aquileia, of Concordia, Alti- 
num, or Ravenna, had always been a merchant, and in 
his new refuge he remained a merchant still. Venice 
was no "crowd of poor fishermen," as it has been 
sometimes described, who were gradually drawn to 
wider ventures and a larger commerce. The port of 
Aquileia had long been the emporium of a trade which 
reached northward to the Danube and eastward to By- 
zantium. What the Roman merchants of Venetia had 
been at Aquileia, they remained at Grado. The com- 
merce of Altinum simply transferred itself to Torcello. 
The Paduan merchants passed to their old port of 



VENICE AND EOME. 261 

Eialto. Vague and rhetorical as is the letter of Cas- 
siodorus, it shows how keen was the mercantile activ- 
ity of the State from its beginning. Nothing could be 
more natural, more continuous in its historical develop- 
ment ; nothing was more startling, more incomprehensi- 
ble to the new world which had grown up in German 
molds. The nobles of Henry VIII.'s court could not 
restrain their sneer at " the fishermen of Venice," the 
stately patricians who could look back from merchant- 
noble to merchant-noble through ages when the mush- 
room houses of England were unheard of. Only the 
genius of Shakspeare seized the grandeur of a social 
organization which was still one with that of Rome and 
Athens and Tyre. The merchant of Venice is with 
him "a royal merchant." His "argosies o'ertop the 
petty traffickers." At the moment when feudalism 
was about to vanish away, the poet comprehended the 
grandeur of that commerce which it scorned, and the 
grandeur of the one State which had carried the nobler 
classic tradition across ages of brutality and ignorance. 
The great commercial State, whose merchants are no- 
bles, whose nobles are Romans, rises in all its majesty 
before us in the " Merchant of Venice." 



II. 

VENICE AND TINTORETTO. 

The fall of Venice dates from the League of Cam- 
bray ; but her victory over the crowd of her assailants 
was followed by half a century of peace and glory such 
as she had never known. Her losses on the main-land 
were in reality a gain, enforcing as they did the cessa- 
tion of that policy of Italian aggression which had eaten 
like a canker into the resources of the State, and drawn 
her from her natural career of commerce and aggran- 
dizement on the sea. If the political power of Venice 
became less, her political influence grew greater than 
ever. The statesmen of France, of England, and of 
Germany studied in the cool, grave school of her Sen- 
ate. We need only turn to." Othello" to find reflected 
the universal reverence for the wisdom of her policy 
and the order of her streets. No policy, however wise, 
could, indeed, avert her fall. The Turkish occupation 
of Egypt, and the Portuguese discovery of a sea -route 
round the Cape of Good Hope, were destined to rob the 
republic of that trade with the East which was the life- 
blood of its commerce. But, though the blow was al- 
ready dealt, its effects were for a time hardly discerni- 



VENICE AND TINTORETTO. 263 

ble. On the contrary, the accumulated wealth of centu- 
ries poured itself out in an almost riotous prodigality. 
A new Venice, a Yenice of loftier palaces, of statelier 
colonnades, rose under Palladio and Sansovino along 
the line of its canals. In the deep peace of the six- 
teenth century, a peace unbroken even by religious 
struggles (for Yenice was the one State exempt from 
the struggle of the Reformation), literature and art won 
their highest triumphs. The press of the Aldi gave for 
the first time the masterpieces of Greek poetry to Eu- 
rope. The novels of Yenice furnished plots for our own 
drama, and became the origin of modern fiction. Paint- 
ing reached its loftiest height in Giorgione, Titian, Tin- 
toret, and Paul Veronese. 

The greatest of colorists sprung from a world of col- 
or. Faded, ruined as the city is now, the frescoes of 
Giorgione swept from its palace fronts by the sea-wind, 
its very gondoliers bare and ragged, the glory of its sun- 
sets alone remains vivid as of old. But it is not difficult 
to restore the many-hued Venice out of which its paint- 
ers sprung. There are two pictures by Carpaccio in the 
Academia which bring back vividly its physical aspect. 
The scene of the first, the " Miracle of the Patriarch of 
Grado," as it is called, lies on the Grand Canal, imme- 
diately in front of the Rialto. It is the hour of sun- 
set, and darker-edged clouds are beginning to fleck the 
golden haze of the west which still arches over the 
broken sky-line, roof, and turret, and bell -tower, and 



264 STRAY STUDIES. 

chimneys of strange fashion with quaint, conical tops. 
The canal lies dusk in the even-tide, but the dark sur- 
face throws into relief a crowd of gondolas, and the 
lithe, glowing figures of their gondoliers. The boats 
themselves are long and narrow as now, but without the 
indented prora which has become universal ; the sumpt- 
uary law of the republic has not yet robbed them of 
color, and instead of the present " coffin " we see cano- 
pies of gayly lined stuffs supported on four light pillars. 
The gondolier himself is commonly tricked out in al- 
most fantastic finery ; red cap, with long golden curls 
flowing down over the silken doublet, slashed hose, the 
light dress displaying those graceful attitudes into which 
the rower naturally falls. On the left side of the canal, 
its white marble steps are crowded with figures of the 
nobler Venetian life ; a black robe here or there break- 
ing the gay variety of golden and purple and red and 
blue ; while in the balcony above a white group of cler- 
gy, with golden candlesticks towering overhead, are 
gathered round the demoniac whose cure forms the 
subject of the picture. 

But the most noteworthy point in it is the light it 
throws on the architectural aspect of Venice at the close 
of the fifteenth century. On the right the houses are 
wholly of mediaeval type, the flat marble-sheeted fronts 
pierced with trefoil-headed lights ; one of them, splen- 
did with painted arabesques, dipping at its base into the 
very waters of the canal, and mounting up to inwreathe 



VENICE AND TINTORETTO. 265 

in intricate patterns the very chimney of the roof. The 
left is filled by a palace of the early Renascence ; but 
the change of architectural style, though it has modified 
.the tone and extent of color, is far from dismissing it 
altogether. The flat pilasters which support the round 
arches of its base are sheeted with a delicately tinged 
marble ; the flower- work of their capitals and the mask 
inclosed within it are gilded like the continuous billet 
molding which runs round in the hollow of each arch; 
while the spandrils are filled in with richer and darker 
marbles, each broken with a central medallion of gold. 
The use of gold, indeed, seems a " note " of the coloring 
of the early Renascence ; a broad band of gold wreathes 
the two rolls beneath and above the cornice, and loz- 
enges of gold light up the bases of the light pillars in 
the colonnade above. In another picture of Carpaccio, 
the "Dismissal of the Embassadors," one sees the same 
principles of coloring extended to the treatment of in- 
teriors. The effect is obtained partly by the contrast of 
the lighter marbles with those of deeper color or with 
porphyry, partly by the contrast of both with gold. Ev- 
erywhere, whether in the earlier buildings of mediaeval 
art or in the later efforts of the Renascence, Venice 
seemed to clothe itself in robes of Oriental splendor, 
and to pour over Western art before its fall the wealth 
and gorgeousness of the East. 

Of the four artist - figures who — in the tradition of 
Tintoret's picture—support this " Golden Calf " of Yen- 



266 STKAY STUDIES. 

ice, Tintoret himself is the one specially Venetian. 
Giorgione was of Castel Franco ; Titian came from the 
mountains of Cadore ; Paolo from Verona. But Jaco- 
po Robusti, the "little dyer," the tintoretto, was born, 
lived, and died in Venice. His works, rare elsewhere, 
crowd its churches, its palaces, its galleries. Its great- 
est art-building is the shrine of his faith. The school 
of San Rocco has rightly been styled by Mr. Ruskin 
"one of the three most precious buildings in the world;' 1 
it is the one spot where all is Tintoret. Few contrasts 
are at first sight more striking than the contrast between 
the building of the Renascence which contains his forty 
masterpieces, and the great mediaeval church of the 
Frari which stands beside it. But a certain oneness, 
after all, links the two buildings together. The friars 
had burst on the caste spirit of the Middle Age, its mere 
classification of brute force, with the bold recognition of 
human equality which ended in the socialism of Wyclif 
and the Lollards. Tintoret found himself facing a new 
caste-spirit in the Renascence, a classification of man- 
kind founded on aesthetic refinement and intellectual 
power ; and it is hard not to see in the greatest of his 
works a protest as energetic as theirs for the common 
rights of men. Into the grandeur of the Venice about 
him, her fame, her wealth, her splendor, none could en- 
ter more vividly. He rises to his best painting, as Mr. 
Ruskin has observed, when his subjects are noble — 
doges, saints, priests, senators clad in purple and jewels 
and gold. But Tintoret is never quite Veronese. He 



VENICE AND TINTORETTO. 267 

can not be untrue to beauty, and the pomps and glories 
of earth are beautiful to him ; but there is a beauty too 
in earth, in man himself. The brown, half-naked gon- 
dolier lies stretched on the marble steps which the doge, 
in one of his finest pictures, has ascended. It is as if 
he had stripped off the stately robe and the ducal cap, 
and shown the soul of Venice in the bare child of the 
lagoons. The fi want of dignity " which some have cen- 
sured in his scenes from the Gospels is in them just as it 
is in the Gospels themselves. Here, as there, the poetry 
lies in the strange, unearthly mingling of the common- 
est human life with the sublimest divine. In his "Last 
Supper," in San Giorgio Maggiore, the apostles are peas- 
ants; the low, mean life of the people is there, but 
hushed and transfigured by the tall standing figure of 
the Master, who bends to give bread to -the disciple by 
his side. And above and around crowd in the legions 
of heaven, cherubim and seraphim mingling their radi- 
ance with the purer radiance from the halo of their 
Lord ; while amidst all this conflict of celestial light the 
twinkling candles upon the board burn on, and the dam- 
sel who enters bearing food, bathed as she is in the very 
glory of heaven, is busy, unconscious — a serving-rnaid, 
and nothing more. 

The older painters had seen something undivine in 
man; the colossal mosaic, the tall, unwomanly Madonna, 
expressed the sense of the Byzantine artist that to be 
divine was to be inhuman. The Kenascence, with lit- 



268 STRAY STUDIES. 

tie faith in God, had faith in man, but only in the might 
and beauty and knowledge of man. With Tintoret the 
common life of man is ever one with heaven. This was 
the faith which he flung on "acres of canvas" as nn- 
grudgingly as apostle ever did, toiling and living as 
apostles lived and toiled. This was the faith he found 
in Old Testament and New, in saintly legend or in na- 
tional history. In " The Annunciation " at San Rocco 
a great bow of angels streaming either way from the 
ethereal dove sweeps into a ruined hut, a few mean 
chairs its only furniture, the mean plaster dropping 
from the bare brick pilasters ; without, Joseph at work 
unheeding, amidst piles of worthless timber flung here 
and there. So, in " The Adoration of the Magi," the 
mother wonders with a peasant's wonder at the jewels 
and gold. Again, " The Massacre of the Innocents " is 
one wild, horror-driven rush of pure motherhood, reck- 
less of all in its clutch at its babe. So, in the splendor 
of his " Circumcision," it is from the naked child that 
the light streams on the high - priest's brow, on the 
mighty robe of purple and gold held up by stately 
forms like a vast banner behind him. The peasant 
mother to whose poorest hut that first stir of child-life 
has brought a vision of angels, who has marveled at the 
wealth of precious gifts which a babe brings to her 
breast, who has felt the sword piercing her own bosom 
also as danger threatened it, on whose mean world her 
child has flung a glory brighter than glory of earth, is 
the truest critic of Tintoret. 



VENICE AND TINTORETTO. 269 

What Shakspeare was to the national history of En- 
gland in his great series of historic dramas, his contem- 
porary, Tintoret, was to the history of Venice. It was, 
perhaps, from an unconscious sense that her annals 
were really closed that the republic began to write her 
history and her exploits in the series of paintings which 
covers the walls of the ducal palace. Her apotheosis 
is like that of the Eoman emperors ; it is when death 
has fallen upon her that her artists raise her into a di- 
vine form, throned amidst heavenly clouds, and crowned 
by angel hands with the laurel wreath of victory. It 
is no longer St. Mark who watches over Venice ; it is 
Venice herself who bends from heaven to bless boat- 
man and senator. In the divine figure of the republic 
with which Tintoret filled the central cartoon of the 
Great Hall every Venetian felt himself incarnate. His 
figure of " Venice " in the Senate Hall is yet nobler ; 
the blue sea-depths are cleft open, and strange ocean- 
shapes wave their homage, and yet more unearthly 
forms dart up with tribute of coral and pearls to the 
feet of the sea-queen as she sits in the silken state of 
the time, with the divine halo around her. But if 
from this picture in the roof the eye falls suddenly on 
the fresco which fills the close of the room, we can 
hardly help reading the deeper comment of Tintoret on 
the glory of the State. The Sala del Consiglio is the 
very heart of Venice. In the double row of plain seats 
running round it sat her nobles ; on the raised dais at 
the end, surrounded by the graver senators, sat her 



270 STRAY STUDIES. 

duke. One long fresco occupies the whole wall above 
the ducal seat; in the background the blue waters of 
the lagoon, with the towers and domes of Venice rising 
from them ; around, a frame-work of six bending saints ; 
in front, two kneeling doges in full ducal robes, with a 
black curtain of clouds between them. The clouds roll 
back to reveal a mighty glory, and in the heart of it the 
livid figure of a dead Christ taken from the cross. Not 
one eye of all the nobles gathered in council could have 
lifted itself from the figure of the doge without falling 
on the figure of the dead Christ. Strange as the con- 
ception is, it is hard to believe that in a mind so pecul- 
iarly symbolical as that of Tintoret the contrast could 
have been without a definite meaning. And if this be 
so, it is a meaning that one can hardly fail to read in 
the history of the time. The brief interval of peace 
and glory had passed away ere Tintoret's brush had 
ceased to toil. The victory of Lepanto had only gilded 
that disgraceful submission to the Turk which preluded 
the disastrous struggle in which her richest possessions 
were to be wrested from the republic. The terrible 
plague of 1576 had carried off Titian. Twelve years 
after Titian, Paul Veronese passed away. Tintoret, 
born almost at its opening, lingered till the very close 
of the century to see Venice sinking into powerlessness 
and infamy and decay. May not the figure of the dead 
Christ be the old man's protest against a pride in which 
all true nobleness and effort had ceased to live, and 
which was hurrying to so shameful a fall ? 



THE DISTRICT VISITOR. 



THE DISTRICT VISITOR 



It would be hard to define exactly the office and 
duties of the district visitor. Historically, she is the 
direct result of the evangelical movement which mark- 
ed the beginning of this century ; the descendant of 
the "devout women not a few" who played, like Han- 
nah More, the part of mothers in Israel to the Simeons 
and Wilberforces of the time. But the mere tract-dis- 
tributor of fifty years ago has grown into a parochial 
and ecclesiastical force of far greater magnitude. The 
district visitor of to-day is parson and almoner in one ; 
the parochial censor of popular morals, the parochial 
instructor in domestic economy. She claims the same 
right as the vicar to knock at every door and obtain 
admission into every house. But once within it, her 
scope of action is far larger than the parson's. To 
the spiritual influence of the tract or "the chapter" 
she adds the more secular and effective power of the 
bread-ticket. "The way to the heart of the poor," 
as she pithily puts it, " lies through their stomachs." 
Pier religious exhortations are backed by scoldings and 
fussiness. She is eloquent upon rags and tatters, and 

18 



274 STRAY STUDIES. 

severe upon dirty floors. She flings open the window 
and lectures her flock on the advantages of fresh air. 
She hurries little Johnny off to school, and gets Sally 
out to service. She has a keen nose for drains and a 
passion for clean hands and faces. What worries her 
most are the fatalism and improvidence of the poor. 
She is full of exhortations to "lay by" for the rainy 
day, and seductive in her praises of the Penny Bank. 
The whole life of the family falls within her supervis- 
ion. She knows the wages of the husband and the occa- 
sional jobs of the wife. She inquires what there is for 
dinner, and gives wise counsels on economical cookery. 
She has her theory as to the hour when children ought 
to be in bed, and fetches in Tommy, much weeping, 
from the last mud -pie of sunset. Only "the master" 
himself lies outside of her rule. Between the husband 
and the district visitor there exists a sort of armed neu- 
trality. Her visits are generally paid when he is at 
work. If she arrives when he happens to be at home, 
he calls for " missus," and retires sheepishly to The Blue 
Boar. The energetic Dorcas who fixes him in a cor- 
ner gets little for her pains. He " supposes " that " mis- 
sus" knows where and when the children go to school, 
and that " missus " may some day or other be induced 
to go to church. But the theory of the British laborer 
is that with his home or his familv, their religion or 
their education, he has nothing personally to do. And 
so he has nothing to do with the district visitor. His 
only demand is that she should let him alone, and the 



THE DISTRICT VISITOR. 275 

wise district visitor soon learns, as parson and curate 
have long learned, to let him alone. 

Like theirs, her work lies with wife and children, 
and, as we have seen, it is of far wider scope even here 
than the work of the clergy. But, fussy and dictato- 
rial as she is, the district visitor is, as a rule, more pop- 
ular than the clergyman. In the first place, the parson 
is only doing a duty he is bound to do, while the dis- 
trict visitor is a volunteer. The parson, as the poor 
roughly say, is paid for it. Again, however simple- 
hearted and courteous he may be, he never gets very 
close home to the poor. Their life is not his life, nor 
their ways his ways. They do not understand his re- 
finement, his delicacy about interference, his gentle- 
manly reticence, his abhorrence of gossip and scandal. 
They are accustomed to be ordered about, to rough 
words, to gossip over their neighbors. And so the dis- 
trict visitor is "more in their way," as they tell her. 
She is profuse of questions, routing out a thousand little 
details that no parson would ever know. She has little 
of the sensitive pride that hinders the vicar from list- 
ening 1 to scandal, or of the manly objection to "'telling 
tales" which hurries him out of the room when neigh- 
bor brings charges against neighbor. She is entirely 
unaffected by his scruples against interference with the 
conscience or religion of the poor. " Where do you go 
to church 8" and " Why don't you go to church ?" are 
her first stock questions in her cross-examination of 



276 STKAY STUDIES. 

every family. Her exhortations at the sick-bed have 
a somewhat startling peremptoriness about them. "We 
can hardly wonder at the wish of a poor patient that 
she were a rich one, because then she could "die in 
peace, and have nobody to come in and pray over her." 
What irritates the district visitor, in cases where she 
has bestowed special religious attention, is that people, 
when so effectively prepared for death, " won't die." 
But hard, practical action such as this does' not jostle 
against the feelings of the poor as it would against our 
own. "Women especially forgive all because the district 
visitor listens as well- as talks. They could no more 
pour out their little budget of domestic troubles to the 
parson than to a being from another world. But the 
district visitor is the recipient of all. The washer -wom- 
an stops her mangle to talk about the hard times and 
the rise of a half-penny on the loaf. The matron next 
door turns up her sleeve to show the bruise her husband 
bestowed on her on his return from The Checkers. 
She enters largely and minutely into the merits and 
defects of her partner's character, and protests with a 
subtle discrimination that " he's a good father when he 
ain't bothered with the children, and a good husband 
when he's off the drink." The old widow down the 
lane is waiting for " the lady " to write a letter for her 
to her son in Australia, and to see the "pictur," the 
cheap photograph of the grandchildren she has never 
seen or will see, that John has sent home. A girl home 
from her " place " wants the district visitor to intercede 



THE DISTRICT VISITOR, 277 

with lier mistress, and listens in all humility to a lecture 
on her giddiness and love of finery. 

The society, in fact, of the little alley is very much 
held together by the district visitor. In her love of 
goody gossip, she fulfills the office which in an Italian 
town is filled by the barber. She retails tittle-tattle for 
the highest ends. She relates Mrs. A.'s misdemeanor 
for the edification and correction of Mrs. B. She has 
the true version of the quarrel between Smith and his 
employer. She is the one person to whom the lane 
looks for accurate information as to the domestic rela- 
tions of* the two Browns, whose quarrels are the scan- 
dal of the neighborhood. Her influence, in fact, over 
the poor is a strange mixture of good and evil, of real 
benevolence with an interference that saps all sense of 
self-respect, of real sympathy and womanly feeling 
with a good deal of womanly meddling, curiosity, and 
babble. 

But her influence on the parish at large is a far more 
delicate question. To the outer world, a parish seems 
a sheer despotism. The parson prays, preaches, changes 
the order of service, distributes the parochial charities 
at his simple discretion. One of the great cries of the 
Church reformer is generally for the substitution of 
some constitutional system, some congregational council, 
some lay co-operation, for this clerical tyranny. But no 
one, in fact, feels the narrow limits of his power more 



278 STRAY STUDIES. 

keenly than the parson himself. As the old French 
monarchy was a despotism tempered by epigrams, so the 
rule of a parish is a despotism tempered by parochial 
traditions, by the observation of neighboring clergymen, 
by the suggestions of the squire, by the opposition of 
church -wardens, by the hints and regrets of "constant 
attendants," by the state of the pew-letting or the ups 
and downs of the offertory, by the influences of local 
opinion, by the censorship of the district visitor. What 
the assembly of his " elders " is to a Scotch minister, the 
district visitors' meeting is to the English clergyman. 
He has to prove, in the face of a standing jealousy, that 
his alms have been equally distributed between district 
and district. His selection of tracts is freely criticised. 
Mrs. A. regrets that her poor people have seen so little 
of their vicar lately. Mrs. B. is sorry to report the fail- 
ure of her attempts to get her sheep to church, in face 
of the new ritualistic development, the processions, and 
the surplices. Mrs. C, whose forte is education, declines 
any longer to induce mothers to send their children to 
"such" a master. The curates shudder as Mrs. D. la- 
ments their frequent absence from the Penny Bank, not 
that they can do any good there, but " we are always 
glad of the presence and sympathy of our clergy." The 
curates promise amendment of life. The vicar engages 
to look out for another school-master, and be more dili- 
gent in his attentions to Muck Lane. A surreptitious 
supply of extra tickets to the ultra-Protestant appeases 
for the moment her wrath against the choir surplices. 



THE DISTRICT VISITOR. 279 

But the occasional screw of the monthly meeting is as 
nothing to the daily pressure applied by the individual 
district visitor. At the bottom of every alley the vicar 
runs up against a parochial censor. The " five minutes' 
conversation " which the district visitor expects as the 
reward of her benevolence becomes a perpetual trickle 
of advice, remonstrance, and even reproof. A strong- 
minded parson, of course, soon makes himself master of 
his district visitors; but the ordinary vicar generally 
feels that his district visitors are masters of him. The 
harm that comes of this feminine despotism is the fem- 
inine impress it leaves on the whole aspect of the parish. 
Manly preaching disappears before the disappointed 
faces the preacher encounters on Monday. A policy of 
expedients and evasions takes the place of any straight- 
forward attempt to meet or denounce local evils. The 
vicar's time and energy are frittered away on a thou- 
sand little jealousies and envyings; his temper is tried in 
humoring one person and conciliating another ; he learns 
to be cautious and reserved and diplomatic, to drop 
hints and suggestions, to become, in a word, the first 
district visitor of his parish. He flies to his wife for 
protection, and finds in her the most effective buffer 
against parochial collisions. Greek meets Greek when 
the vicar's wife meets the district visitor. But the vicar 
himself sinks into a parochial nobody, a being as sacred 
and as powerless as the Lama of Thibet. 

It was hardly to be expected that the progress of re- 



280 STRAY STUDIES. 

ligion and charitable feeling should fail to raise up for- 
midable rivals to the district visitor. To the more ec- 
clesiastical mind she is hardly ecclesiastical enough for 
the prominent part she claims in the parochial system. 
Her lace and Parisian bonnet are an abomination. She 
has a trick of being terribly Protestant, and her Prot- 
estantism is somewhat dictatorial. On the other hand, 
to the energetic organizer, whose ideal of a parish is a 
well-oiled machine turning out piety and charity with- 
out hitches or friction, she is simply a parochial impedi- 
ment. She has no system. Her visiting days are de- 
termined by somewhat eccentric considerations. Her 
almsgiving is regulated by no principle whatever. She 
carries silly likes and dislikes into her work among the 
poor. She rustles into wrath at any attempt to intro- 
duce order into her efforts, and regards it as a piece 
of ungrateful interference. She is always ready with 
threats of resignation, with petty suspicions of ill-treat- 
ment, with jealousies of her fellow- workers. We can 
hardly wonder that in ecclesiastical quarters she is re- 
treating before the Sister of Mercy, while in the more 
organized parishes she is being superseded by the dea- 
coness. The deaconess has nothing but contempt for 
the mere " volunteer " movement in charity. She has 
a strong sense of order and discipline, and a hatred of 
" francs -tireurs." Above all, she is a woman of busi- 
ness. She is without home or child, and her time and 
labor are arranged with military precision. She has her 
theory of the poor and of what can be done for the 



THE DISTRICT VISITOR. 281 

poor, and she rides her hobby from morning to night, 
with an equal contempt for the sentimental almsgiving 
of the district visitor and for the warnings of the polit- 
ical economist. No doubt an amazing deal of good is 
done, but it is done in a methodical fashion that is a lit- 
tle trying to ordinary flesh and blood. The parish is 
elaborately tabulated. The poor are grouped and tick- 
eted. The charitable agencies of the parish are put in 
connection with the hospital and the work-house. This 
case is referred to the dispensary, that to the overseer. 
The deaconess prides herself on not being " taken in." 
The washer-woman finds that her " out-door allowance " 
has been ascertained and set off against her share in 
the distribution of alms. The pious old woman who 
has played off the charity of the church against the 
charity of the chapel is struck off the list. The mis- 
erable creature who drags out existence on a bit of 
bread and a cup of tea is kindly but firmly advised to 
try " the house." Nothing can be wiser, nothing more 
really beneficial to the poor, than the work of the dea- 
coness ; but it is a little dry and mechanical. The ill- 
used wife of the drunkard sighs after the garrulous sym- 
pathy of the district visitor. The old gossip and dawdle 
have disappeared from the parochial charity, but with 
them has gone a good deal of the social contact, the 
sympathy of rich with poor, in which its chief virtue 
lay. The very vicar sighs after a little human imper- 
fection and irregularity as he reads the list of sick cases 
" to be visited this morning." 



282 STRAY STUDIES. 

The one lingering touch of feminine weakness in the 
deaconess comes out in her relations with the clergy. 
The deaconess is not a " Sister " — she is most precise in 
enforcing the distinction — but she is a woman with a 
difference. She has not retired from the world, but a 
faint flavor of the nun hangs about her. She has left 
behind all thought of coquetry, but she prefers to work 
with a married clergyman. Her delicacy can just en- 
dure a celibate curate, but it shrinks aghast from a 
bachelor incumbent. We know a case where a bishop, 
anxious to retain a deaconess in a poor parish, was pri- 
vately informed that her stay would depend on the ap- 
pointment of a married clergyman to the vacant living. 
On the other hand, a married clergyman is as great a 
trial to the Sister of Mercy* as an unmarried one to the 
deaconess. The "Sister" idealizes the priesthood as she 
idealizes the poor. Their poverty is a misfortune ; their 
improvidence an act of faith ; their superstition the last 
ray of poetic religion lingering in this world of skepti- 
cism and commonplace. All the regularity and sense 
of order which exist in the Sisters mind are concen- 
trated on her own life in the sisterhood ; she is punctil- 
ious about her " hours," and lives in a perpetual tinkle 
of little bells. But in her work among the poor she re- 
volts from system or organization. She hates the work- 
house. She looks upon a guardian or an overseer as an 
oppressor of the poor. She regards theories of pauper- 
ism as something very wicked and irreligious, and lav- 
ishes her alms with a perfect faith that good must come 



THE DISTRICT VISITOR. 283 

of it. In a word, she is absolutely unwise, but there is 
a poetry in her unwisdom that contrasts strangely witli 
the sensible prose of the deaconess. While the one en- 
ters in her book of statistics the number of uneducated 
children, the other is trotting along the street with little 
Tommy in one hand and little Polly in the other on 
their way to the school. She has washed their faces 
and tidied their hair, and believes she has done service 
to little angels. Tommy and Polly are very far from 
being angels, but both sides are the happier for the ro- 
mantic hypothesis. There is a good deal of romance 
and sentiment in the Sister's view of her work among 
the poor ; but it is a romance that nerves her to a cer- 
tain grandeur of soul. A London clergyman in whose 
district the black fever had broken out could get no 
nurses among the panic-stricken neighbors. He tele- 
graphed to a "Home," and next morning he found a 
lady-like girl on her knees on the floor of the infected 
house, scrubbing, cleaning, putting the w T orn-out mother 
to bed, hushing the children, nursing quietly and thor- 
oughly as few nurses could do. The fever was beaten, 
and the little heroine went off at the call of another tel- 
egram to charge another battery of death. It is this 
chivalrous poetic side that atones for the many follies of 
sisterhoods ; for the pauperism they introduce among 
the poor, the cliquism of their inner life, the absurdi- 
ties of their " holy obedience." Each of these charita- 
ble agencies, in fact, has its work to do, and does it in 
its own way. On paper there can be no doubt that the 



284 STRAY STUDIES. 

Sister of Mercy is the most attractive figure of the 
three. The incumbent of a heavy parish will probably 
turn with a smile to the more methodical labors of the 
deaconess. But those who shrink alike from the ideal- 
ism of one and the system of the other, who feel that 
the poor are neither angels nor wheels in a machine, 
and that the chief w T ork to be done among them is the 
diffusion of kindly feeling and the drawing of class 
nearer to class, will probably prefer to either the old- 
fashioned district visitor. 



THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD. 



THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD. 



To most Oxford men, indeed to the common visitor 
of Oxford, the town seems a mere offshoot of the Uni- 
versity. Its appearance is altogether modern; it pre- 
sents hardly any monument that can vie in antiquity 
with the venerable fronts of colleges and halls. An 
isolated church here and there tells a different tale ; 
but the largest of its parish churches is best known as 
the Church of the University ; and the Church of St. 
Frideswide, which might suggest even to a careless ob- 
server some idea of the town's greatness before Univer- 
sity life began, is known to most visitors simply as Christ- 
church Chapel. In all outer seeming, Oxford appears a 
mere assemblage of indifferent streets that have grown 
out of the needs of the University, and this impression 
is heightened by its commercial unimportance. The 
town has no manufacture or trade. It is not even, like 
Cambridge, a great agricultural centre. Whatever im- 
portance it derived from its position on the Thames has 
been done away with by the almost total cessation of 
river navigation. Its very soil is, in large measure, in- 
academical hands. As a municipality, it seems to exist 
only by grace or usurpation of prior University privi- 



288 STRAY STUDIES. 

leges. It is not long since Oxford gained control over 
its own markets or its own police. The peace of the 
town is still but partially in the hands of its magistrates, 
and the riotous student is amenable only to University 
jurisdiction. Within the memory of living men, the 
chief magistrate of the city, on his entrance into office, 
was bound to swear, in a humiliating ceremony, not 
to violate the privileges of the great academical body 
which reigned supreme within its walls. 

Historically, the very reverse of all this is really the 
case. So far is the University from being older than 
the city, that Oxford had already seen five centuries 
of borough life before a student appeared within its 
streets. Instead of its prosperity being derived from 
its connection with the University, that connection has 
probably been its commercial ruin. The gradual sub- 
jection both of markets and trade to the arbitrary con- 
trol of an ecclesiastical corporation was inevitably fol- 
lowed by their extinction. The University found Ox- 
ford a busy, prosperous borough, and reduced it to a 
cluster of lodging-houses. It found it among the first 
of English municipalities, and it so utterly crushed its 
freedom that the recovery of some of the commonest 
rights of self-government has only been brought about 
by recent legislation. Instead of the mayor being a 
dependent on chancellor or vice-chancellor, chancellor 
and vice-chancellor have simply usurped the far older 
authority of the mayor. 



THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD. 289 

The story of the struggle which ended in this usur- 
pation is one of the most interesting in our municipal 
annals ; and it is one which has left its mark, not on 
the town only, but on the very constitution and char- 
acter of the conquering University. But to understand 
the struggle, we must first know something of the town 
itself. At the earliest moment, then, when its academic 
history can be said to open, at the arrival of the legist 
Vacarius, in the reign of Stephen, Oxford stood in the 
first rank of English municipalities. In spite of anti- 
quarian fancies, it is certain that no town had arisen 
on its site for centuries after the departure of the Eo- 
man legions from the isle of Britain. The little mon- 
astery of St. Frideswide rises in the turmoil of the 
eighth century, only to fade out of sight again, with- 
out giving us a glimpse of the borough which gather- 
ed probably beneath its walls. The first definite evi- 
dence for its existence lies in a brief entry of the En- 
glish chronicle which records its seizure by the succes- 
sor of ^Elfred. But, though the form of this entry 
shows the town to have been already considerable, we 
hear nothing more of it till the last terrible wrestle of 
England with the Dane, when its position on the bor- 
ders of the Mercian and West-Saxon realms seems for 
the moment to have given it a political importance 
under ^Ethelred and Cnut strikingly analogous to that 
which it acquired in the Great Rebellion. Of the life 
of its burgesses in this earlier period of Oxford life we 
know little or nothing. The names of its parishes, St. 

19 



290 STRAY STUDIES. 

Aldate, St. Ebbe, St. Mildred, and St. Edmund, show 
how early church after church gathered round the 
earlier church of St. Martin. The minster of St. Fri- 
deswide, in becoming the later cathedral, has brought 
down to our own times the memory of the ecclesias- 
tical origins to which the little borough owed its ex- 
istence. But the men themselves are dim to us. Their 
town-meeting, their Portmannimote, still lives in shad- 
owy fashion as the Freeman's Common Hall; their 
town -mead is still Port-meadow. But it is only by later 
charters, or the record of Domesday, that we see them 
going on pilgrimage to the shrines of Winchester, or 
chaffering in their market-place, or judging and law- 
making in their busting, their merchant guild regula- 
ting trade, their reeve gathering his king's dues of tax 
or honey, or marshaling his troop of burghers for the 
king's wars, their boats floating down the Thames to- 
ward London, and paying the toll of a hundred herrings 
in Lent-tide to the Abbot of Abingdon by the way. 

Of the conquest of Oxford by William the Norman 
we know nothing, though the number of its houses 
marked "waste" in the Survey seems to point to a des- 
perate resistance. But the ruin was soon repaired. 
No city better illustrates the transformation of the land 
in the hands of its new masters, the sudden outburst of 
industrial effort, the sudden expansion of commerce and 
accumulation of wealth which followed the Conquest. 
The architectural glory of the town, in fact, dates from 



THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD. 291 

the settlement of the Norman within its walls. To the 
west of the town rose one of the stateliest of English 
castles, and in the meadows beneath the hardly less 
stately Abbey of Osney. In the fields to the north the 
last of the Norman kings raised his palace of Beaumont. 
The canons of St. Frideswide reared the church which 
still exists as the diocesan cathedral : the piety of the 
Norman earls rebuilt almost all the parish churches of 
the city, and founded within their new castle walls the 
church of the canons of St. George. 

But Oxford does more than illustrate this outburst of 
industrial effort; it does something toward explaining 
its cause. The most characteristic result of the Con- 
quest was planted in the very heart of the town, in the 
settlement of the Jew. Here, as elsewhere, the Jewry 
was a town within a town, w r ith its own language, its 
own religion and law, its peculiar commerce, its pe- 
culiar dress. The policy of our foreign kings secured 
each Hebrew settlement from the common taxation, the 
common justice, the common obligations, of Englishmen. 
No city bailiff could penetrate into the square of little 
streets which lay behind the present town -hall; the 
Church itself w r as pow T erless against the synagogue that 
rose in haughty rivalry beside the cloister of St. Frides- 
wide. The picture which Scott has given us in " Ivan- 
hoe" of Isaac of York, timid, silent, crouching under 
oppression, accurately as it represents our modern no- 
tions of the position of his race during the Middle Ages, 



292 STRAY STUDIES. 

is far from being borne out by historical fact.- In En- 
gland, at least, the attitude of the Jew is almost to the 
end an attitude of proud and even insolent defiance. 
His extortion was sheltered from the common law. 
His bonds were kept under the royal seal. A royal 
commission visited with heavy penalties any outbreak 
of violence against these " chattels " of the king. The 
thunders of the Church broke vainly on the yellow gab- 
ardine of the Jew. In a well-known story of Eadmer's, 
the Red King actually forbids the conversion of a Jew 
to the Christian faith : it was a poor exchange, which 
would have robbed him of a valuable property, and 
given him only a subject. 

At Oxford the attitude of the Jewry toward the na- 
tional religion showed a marked consciousness of this 
royal protection. Prior Philip, of St. Frideswide, com- 
plains bitterly of a certain Hebrew with the odd name 
of " Deus-cum-crescat," who stood at his door as the pro- 
cession of the saint passed by, mocking at the miracles 
wrought at her shrine. Halting and then walking firm- 
ly on his feet, showing his hands clenched as if with 
palsy and then flinging open his fingers, the mocking 
Jew claimed gifts and oblations from the crowd who 
flocked to St. Frideswide's, on the ground that such re- 
coveries of limb and strength were quite as real as any 
Frideswide had wrought. But though sickness and 
death, in the prior's story, avenge the insult to his shrine, 
no earthly power, ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have 



THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD. 293 

ventured to meddle with "Dens- cum -crescat." The 
feud between the priory and the Jewry went on un- 
checked for a century more, to culminate in a daring 
act of fanaticism on the Ascension-day of 1268. As 
the usual procession of scholars and citizens returned 
from St. Frideswide's, a Jew suddenly burst from the 
group of his comrades in front of the synagogue, and, 
snatching the crucifix from its bearer, trod it under foot. 
But even in presence of such an outrage as this, the 
terror of the Crown shielded the Jewry from any burst 
of popular indignation. The sentence of the king con- 
demned the Jews of Oxford to erect a cross of marble 
on the spot where the crime was committed ; but even 
this was remitted in part, and a less offensive place was 
allotted for the cross in an open plot by Merton College. 

With the Jewish settlement began the cultivation of 
physical science in Oxford. The Hebrew instruction, 
the Hebrew books which he found among its rabbis, 
were the means by which Roger Bacon penetrated to 
the older world of material research. A medical school, 
which we find established there and in high repute dur- 
ing the twelfth century, can hardly have been other 
than Jewish : in the operation for the stone, which one 
of the stories in the " Miracles of St. Frideswide " pre- 
serves for us, we trace the traditional surgery which is 
still common in the East. But it is perhaps in a more 
purely material way that the Jewry at Oxford most di- 
rectly influenced our academical history. There, as 



294 STRAY STUDIES. 

elsewhere, the Jew brought with him something more 
than the art or science which lie had gathered at Cor- 
dova or Bagdad ; he brought with him the new power 
of wealth. The erection of stately castles, of yet state- 
lier abbeys, which followed the Conquest, the rebuilding 
of almost every cathedral or conventual church, marks 
the advent of the Jewish capitalist. No one can study 
the earlier history of our great monastic houses without 
finding the secret of that sudden outburst of industrial 
activity to which we owe the noblest of our minsters in 
the loans of the Jew. The bonds of many a great bar- 
on, the relics of many an abbey, lay pledged for security 
in the. " Star Chamber " of the Jew. 

His arrival at Oxford is marked by the military and 
ecclesiastical erections of its Norman earls. But a re- 
sult of his presence, which bore more directly on the 
future of the town, was seen in the remarkable devel- 
opment of its domestic architecture. To the wealth of 
the Jew, to his need of protection against sudden out- 
bursts of popular passion, very probably to the greater 
refinement of his social life, England owes the introduc- 
tion of stone houses. Tradition attributes almost every 
instance of the earliest stone buildings of a domestic 
character to the Jew ; and where the tradition can be 
tested, as at Bury St. Edmunds or Lincoln, it has proved 
to be in accordance with the facts. In Oxford nearly 
all the larger dwelling-houses which were subsequently 
converted into hails bore traces of their Jewish origin 



THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD. 295 

in their names, such as Moysey's Hall, Lombards', 
Jacob's Hall. It is a striking proof of the superiority 
of the Hebrew dwellings to the Christian houses around 
them, that each of the successive town-halls of the bor- 
ough had, before their expulsion, been houses of Jews. 
Such houses were abundant in the town, not merely in 
the purely Jewish quarter on Carfax, but in the lesser 
Jewry which was scattered over the parish of St. Al- 
date ; and we can hardly doubt that this abundance of 
substantial buildings in the town was at least one of 
the causes which drew teachers and students within its 
walls. 

The same great event which flung down the Jewish 
settlement in the very heart of the English town bound- 
ed it to the west by the castle and the abbey of the 
conquerors. Oxford stood first on the line of great 
fortresses which, passing by Wallingford and Windsor 
to the Tower of London, guarded the course of the 
Thames. Its castellan, Robert D'Oilly, had followed 
William from Normandy, and had fought by his side at 
Senlac. Oxfordshire was committed by the conqueror 
to his charge ; and he seems to have ruled it in rude, 
soldierly fashion, enforcing order, heaping up riches, 
tripling the taxation of the town, pillaging without scru- 
ple the older religious houses of the neighborhood. It 
was only by ruthless exaction such as this that the work 
which William had set him to do could be done. Mon- 
ey was needed above all for the great fortress which 



296 STRAY STUDIES. 

held the town. The new castle rose on the eastern bank 
of the Thames, broken here into a number of small 
streamlets, one of which served as the deep moat which 
encircled its walls. A well marked the centre of the 
wide castle-court; to the north of it, on a lofty mound, 
rose the great keep ; to the west, the one tower which 
remains, the Tower of St. George, frowned over the river 
and the mill. Without the walls of the fortress lay the 
Bailly, a space cleared by the merciless policy of the 
castellan, with the Church of St. Peter le Bailly, which 
still marks its extent. 

The hand of Robert D'Oilly fell as heavily on the 
Church as on the townsmen. Outside the town lay a 
meadow belonging to the Abbey of Abingdon, which 
seemed suitable for the exercise of the soldiers of his 
garrison. The earl was an old plunderer of the abbey. 
He had wiled away one of its finest manors from its 
abbot, Athelm ; but his seizure of the meadow beside 
Oxford drove the monks to despair. Night and day 
they threw themselves weeping before the altar of the 
two English saints whose names were linked to the old- 
er glories of their house. But while they invoked the 
vengeance of Dunstan and ^Ethelwold on their plunder- 
er, the earl, fallen sick, tossed fever-smitten on his bed. 
At last Robert dreamed that he stood in a vast court, 
one of a crow T d of nobles gathered round a throne 
whereon sat a lady passing fair. Before her knelt two 
brethren of the abbey, weeping for the loss of their 



THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD. 297 

mead and pointing out the castellan as the robber. The 
lady bid Robert be seized, and 1,wo youths hurried him 
away to the field itself, seated him on the ground, piled 
burning hay around him, smoked him, tossed hay-bands 
in his face, and set fire to his beard. The earl woke 
trembling at the divine discipline; he at once took boat 
for Abingdon, and restored to the monks the meadow 
he had reft from them. His terror was not satisfied by 
the restitution of his plunder, and he returned to set 
about the restoration of the ruined churches within and 
without the walls of Oxford. The tower of St. Michael's, 
the door-way of St. Ebbe's, the chancel arch of Holywell, 
the crypt and chancel of St. Peter's-in-the-East, are frag- 
ments of the w T ork done by Robert and his house. But 
the great monument of the devotion of the D'Oillys rose 
beneath the walls of their castle. Robert, a nephew of 
the first castellan, had wedded Edith, a concubine of 
Henry I. The rest of the story we may tell in the En- 
glish of Leland. " Edyth used to walke out of Oxford 
Castelle with her gentlewomen to solace, and that oft- 
entymes where yn a certen place in a tree, as often as 
she cam, a certain pyes used to gather to it, and ther to 
chattre, and as it were to spek on to her, Edyth much 
mervelyng at this matter, and w r as sumtyme sore ferid 
by it as by a wonder." Radulf, a canon of St. Frides- 
wide's, was consulted on the marvel, and his counsel 
ended in the erection of the Priory of Osney beneath 
the walls of the castle. The foundation of the D'Oillys 
became one of the wealthiest and largest of the English 



298 STB AY STUDIES. 

abbeys; but of its vast church and lordly abbot's house, 
the great quadrangle of its cloisters, the almshouses 
without its gate, the pleasant walks shaded with stately 
elms beside the river, not a trace remains. Its bells 
alone were saved at the Dissolution by their transfer to 
Christchurch. 

The military strength of the castle of the D'Oillys 
was tested in the struggle between Stephen and the em- 
press. Driven from London by a rising of its burghers 
at the very moment when the crown seemed within her 
grasp, Maud took refuge at Oxford. In the succeeding 
year Stephen found himself strong enough to attack his 
rival in her stronghold ; his knights swam the river, fell 
hotly on the garrison which had sallied without the 
walls to meet them, chased them through the gates, and 
rushed pell-mell with the fugitives into the city. Houses 
were burned and the Jewry sacked ; the Jews, if tradi- 
tion is to be trusted, were forced to raise against the 
castle the work that still bears the name of "Jews' 
Mount ;" but the strength of its walls foiled the efforts 
of the besiegers, and the attack died into a close block- 
ade. Maud was, however, in Stephen's grasp, and nei- 
ther the loss of other fortresses nor the rigor of the win- 
ter could tear the king from his prey. Despairing of 
relief, the empress at last resolved to break through the 
enemy's lines. Every stream was frozen and the earth 
covered with snow, when, clad in white, and with three 
knights in white garments as her attendants, Maud pass- 



THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD. 299 

ed unobserved through the outposts, crossed the Thames 
upon the ice, and made her way to Abingdon and the 
fortress of Wallingford. 

With the surrender which followed, the military his- 
tory of Oxford ceases till the Great Eebellion. Its 
political history had still to attain its highest reach in 
the Parliament of De Montfort. The great assemblies 
held at Oxford under Cnut, Stephen, and Henry III., 
are each memorable in their way. With the first closed 
the struggle between Englishman and Dane; with the 
second closed the conquest of the Norman; with the 
third began the regular progress of constitutional liber- 
ty. The position of the town, on the border between 
the England that remained to the West -Saxon kings 
and the England that had become the " Danelagh " of 
their Northern assailants, had from the first pointed 
it out as the place where a union between Dane and 
Englishman could best be brought about. The first at- 
tempt was foiled by the savage treachery of ^Ethelred 
the Unread3 r . The death of Swegen and the return of 
Cnut to Denmark left an opening for a reconciliation, 
and Englishmen and Danes gathered at Oxford round 
the king. But all hope was foiled by the assassination 
of the lawmen of the seven Danish boroughs, Sigeferth 
and Morcar, who fell at a banquet by the hand of the 
minister Eadric, while their followers threw themselves 
into the tower of St. Frideswide, and perished in the 
flames that consumed it. The overthrow of the English 



300 STKAY STUDIES. 

monarchy avenged the treason. But Cnut was of no- 
bler stuff than yEthelred, and his conquest of the realm 
was followed by the gathering of a new gemote at Ox- 
ford to resume the work of reconciliation which Eadric 
had interrupted. Englishmen and Dane agreed to live 
together as one people under Eadgar's law, and the wise 
government of the king completed, in the long years 
of his reign, the task of national fusion. The conquest 
of William set two peoples a second time face to face 
upon the same soil, and it was again at Oxford that, 
by his solemn" acceptance and promulgation of the 
Charter of Henry I. in solemn Parliament, Stephen 
closed the period of military tyranny, and began the 
union of Norman and Englishman into a single people. 
These two great acts of national reconciliation were tit 
preludes for the work of the famous assembly which 
has received from its enemies the name of " the Mad 
Parliament." In the June of 1258, the barons met at 
Oxford under Earl Simon de Montfort, to commence 
the revolution to which we owe our national liber- 
ties. Followed by long trains of men in arms, and 
sworn together by pledges of mutual fidelity, they 
wrested from Henry III. the great reforms which, 
frustrated for the moment, have become the basis of 
our constitutional system. On the "Provisions of Ox- 
ford" followed the regular establishment of Parlia- 
mentary representation and power, of a popular and 
responsible ministry, of the principle of local self-gov- 
ernment. 



THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD. 301 

From parliaments and sieges, from Jew and castellan, 
it is time to turn back to the humbler annals of the 
town itself. The first event that lifts it into historic 
prominence is its league with London. The "barge- 
men " of the borough seem to have already existed be- 
fore the Conquest, and to have been closely united from 
the first with the more powerful guild, the " boatmen " 
or "merchants" of the capital. In both cases it is 
probable that the bodies bearing this name represent- 
ed what in later language was known as the merchant 
guild of the town ; the original association, that is, of 
its principal traders for purposes of mutual protection, 
of commerce, and of self-government. Royal recog- 
nition enables us to trace the merchant guild of Oxford 
from the time of Henry I.; even then indeed lands, 
islands, pastures, already belonged to it, and among them 
the same "Port-meadow" or "Town-mead" so familiar 
to Oxford men pulling lazily on a summer's noon to 
Godstow, and which still remains the property of the 
freemen of the town. The connection between the 
two cities and their guilds was primarily one of traf- 
fic. Prior even to the Conquest, " in the time of King 
Eadward and Abbot Ordric ," the channel of the river 
running beneath the walls of the Abbey of' Abingdon 
became so blocked up " that boats could scarce pass as 
far as Oxford." It was at the joint prayer of the bur- 
gesses of London and Oxford that the abbot dug a new 
channel through the meadow to the south of his church, 
the two cities engaging that each barge should pay a 



302 STRAY STUDIES. 

toll of a hundred herrings on its passage during Lent. 
But the union soon took a constitutional form. The 
earliest charter of the capital which remains in detail 
is that of Henry L, and from the charter of his grand- 
son we find a similar date assigned to the liberties of 
Oxford. The customs and exemptions of its burghers 
are granted by Henry II., "as ever they enjoyed them 
in the time of King Henry my grandfather, and in like 
manner as my citizens of London hold them." This 
identity of municipal privileges is, of course, common 
to many other boroughs, for the charter of London be- 
came the model for half the charters of the kingdom. 
What is peculiar to Oxford is the federal bond which 
in Henry II.'s time already linked the two cities togeth- 
er. In case of any doubt or contest about judgment 
in their own court, the burgesses of Oxford were em- 
powered to refer the matter to the decision of Lon- 
don, " and whatever the citizens of London shall ad- 
judge in such cases shall be deemed right." The ju- 
dicial usages, the municipal rights of each city, were 
assimilated by Henry's charter. " Of whatever mat- 
ter they shall be put in plea, they shall deraign them- 
selves according to the law and customs of the city of 
London, and not otherwise, because they and the citi- 
zens of London are of one and the same custom, law, 
and liberty." 

In no two cities has municipal freedom experienced 
a more different fate than in the two that were so close- 



THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD. 303 

ly bound together. The liberties of London waxed 
greater and greater till they were lost in the general 
freedom of the realm: those of Oxford were trodden 
underfoot till the city stood almost alone in its bond- 
age among the cities of England. But it would have 
been hard for a burgher of the twelfth century, flush- 
ed with the pride of his new charter, or fresh from the 
scene of a coronation where he had stood side by side 
with the citizens of London and Winchester as repre- 
senting one of the chief cities of the realm, to have 
dreaded any danger to the liberties of his borough from 
the mob of half -starved boys who were beginning to 
pour year after year into the town. The wealthy mer- 
chant who passed the group of shivering students hud- 
dled round a teacher as poor as themselves in porch and 
door-way, or dropped his alms into the cap of the men- 
dicant scholar, could hardly discern that beneath rags 
and poverty lay a power greater than the power of 
kings, the power for which Becket had died, and which 
bowed Henry to penance and humiliation. On all but 
its eastern side, indeed, the town was narrowly hemmed 
in by jurisdictions independent of its own. The pre- 
cincts of the Abbey of Osney, the wide bailly of the 
castle, bounded it narrowly on the west. To the north, 
stretching away to the little church of St. Giles, lay the 
fields of the royal manor of Beaumont. The Abbot of 
Abingdon, whose woods of Cumnor and Bagley closed 
the southern horizon, held his leet court in the small 
hamlet of Grampound beyond the bridge. Nor was the 



804 STRAY STUDIES. 

whole space within its walls altogether subject to the 
self-government of the citizens. The Jewry, a town 
within a town, lay isolated and exempt from the com- 
mon justice or law in the very heart of the borough. 
Scores of householders, dotted over the various streets, 
were tenants of abbey or castle, and paid neither suit 
nor service to the city court. But within these narrow 
bounds, and amidst these various obstacles, the spirit of 
municipal liberty lived a life the more intense that it 
was so closely cabined and confined. 

It was, in fact, at the moment when the first Oxford 
students appeared within its walls that the city attained 
complete independence. The twelfth century, the age 
of the Crusades, of the rise of the scholastic philoso- 
phy, of the renewal of classical learning, was also the 
age of a great communal movement that stretched from 
Italy along the Rhone and the Rhine, the Seine and 
the Somme, to England. The same great revival of 
individual human life in the industrial masses of the 
feudal world that hurried half Christendom to the Holy 
Land, or gathered hundreds of eager faces round the 
lecture-stall of Abelard, beat back Barbarossa from the 
walls of Alessandria, and nerved the burghers of North- 
ern France to struggle, as at Amiens, for liberty. In 
England the same spirit took a milder and perhaps 
more practical form, from the different social and polit- 
ical conditions with which it had to deal. The quiet 
townships of Teutonic England had no traditions of a 



THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD. 305 

Eoman past to lure them on, like the cities of Italy, into 
dreams of sovereignty. Their ruler was no foreign 
Csesar, distant enough to give a chance for resistance, 
but a king near at hand, and able to enforce obedience 
and law. The king's peace shielded them from that 
terrible oppression of the mediaeval baronage which 
made liberty with the cities of Germany a matter of 
life or death. The peculiarity of municipal life, in fact, 
in England is that, instead of standing apart from and 
in contrast with the general life around it, the progress 
of the English town moved in perfect harmony with 
that of the nation at large. The earlier burgher was 
the freeman within the walls, as the peasant-ceorl was 
the freeman without. Freedom went with the posses- 
sion of land in town as in country. The citizen held 
his burgher's rights by his tenure of the bit of ground 
on which his tenement stood. He was the king's free 
tenant, and, like the rural tenants, he owed his lord dues 
of money or kind. In township or manor alike, the 
king's reeve gathered this rental, administered justice, 
commanded the little troop of soldiers that the spot was 
bound to furnish in time of war. The progress of 
municipal freedom, like that of national freedom, was 
wrought rather by the slow growth of wealth and of 
popular spirit, by the necessities of kings, by the policy 
of a few great statesmen, than by the sturdy revolts that 
wrested liberty from the French seigneur, or the cent- 
ury of warfare that broke the power of the Csesars in 
the plain of the Po. 

20 



806 STRAY STUDIES. 

Much, indeed, that Italy or France had to win by the 
sword was already the heritage of every English free- 
man within walls or without. The common assembly, 
in which their own public affairs were discussed and de- 
cided ; the borough - mote, to which every burgher was 
summoned by the town-bell swinging out of the town- 
tower, had descended, by traditional usage, from the 
customs of the first English settlers in Britain. The 
close association of the burghers in the sworn brother- 
hood of the ouiild was a Teutonic custom of immemorial 
antiquity. Gathered at the guild supper round the com- 
mon fire, sharing the common meal, and draining the 
guild cup, the burghers added to the tie of mere neigh- 
borhood that of loyal association, of mutual counsel, of 
mutual aid. The regulation of internal trade, all lesser 
forms of civil jurisdiction, fell quietly and without a 
struggle into the hands of the merchant guild. The rest 
of their freedom was bought with honest cash. The 
sale of charters brought money to the royal treasury, ex- 
hausted by Norman wars, by the herd of mercenaries, 
by Crusades, by the struggle with France. The towns 
bought first the commutation of the uncertain charges 
to which they were subject at the royal will for a fixed 
annual rent. Their purchase of the right of internal 
justice followed. Last came the privilege of electing 
their own magistrates, of enjoying complete self-govern- 
ment. Oxford had already passed through the earlier 
steps of this emancipation before the conquest of the 
Norman. Her citizens assembled in their Portmanni- 



THE EARLY HISTORY OF OXFORD. 307 

mote, their free self-ruling assembly. Their merchant- 
guild leagued with that of London. Their dues to the 
Crown are assessed in Domesday at a fixed sum of hon- 
ey and coin. The charter of Henry II. marks the ac- 
quisition by Oxford, probably at a far earlier date, of 
judicial and commercial freedom. Liberty of external 
commerce was given by the exemption of its citizens 
from toll on the king's lands; the decision of either 
political or judicial affairs was left to their borough- 
mote. The highest point of municipal independence 
w T as reached when the Charter of John substituted a 
mayor of their own choosing for the mere bailiff of the 
Crown. 

It is hard, in dry constitutional details such as these, 
to realize the quick pulse of popular life that stirred 
such a community as Oxford. Only a few names, of 
street and lane, a few hints gathered from obscure rec- 
ords, enable one to see the town of the twelfth or thir- 
teenth century. The Church of St. Martin, in the very 
heart of it, at the "Quatrevoix" or Carfax where its 
four roads meet, was the centre of the city's life. The 
town-mote was held in its church-yard. Justice was ad- 
ministered by mayor and bailiff sitting beneath the low 
shed, the " penniless bench " of later times, without its 
eastern wall. Its bell summoned the burghers to coun- 
sel or to arms. Around the church lay the trade-guilds, 
ranged as in some vast encampment ; Spicery and Vint- 
nery to the south, Fish Street falling noisily down to the 



308 STRAY STUDIES. 

Bridge, the corn - market occupying then, as now, the 
street which led to Northgate, the stalls of the butchers 
ranged in their "Butcher-row" along the road to the 
castle. Close beneath the church to the south-east lay 
a nest of huddled lanes broken by a stately synagogue, 
and traversed from time to time by the yellow gabar- 
dine of the Jew, whose burying - place lay far away to 
the eastward, on the site of the present Botanic Gar- 
den. Soldiers from the castle rode clashing through the 
narrow streets; the bells of Osney clanged from the 
swampy meadows ; long processions of pilgrims w T ound 
past the Jewry to the shrine of St. Frideswide. It 
was a rough time, and frays were common enough — 
now the sack of a Jew's house, now burgher drawing 
knife on burgher, now an outbreak of the young stu- 
dent lads, who grew every day in numbers and audacity. 
But as yet the town seemed well in hand. The clang 
of the city bell called every citizen to his door ; the sum- 
mons of the mayor brought trade after trade, with bow 
in hand and banners flying, to enforce the king's peace. 
Order and freedom seemed absolutely secure ; and there 
was no sign which threatened that century of disorder, 
of academical and ecclesiastical usurpation, which hum- 
bled the municipal freedom of Oxford to the dust. 



THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS. 






THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS. 



For those who possess historic tastes, slender purses, 
and an exemption from Alpine mania, few holidays are 
more pleasant than a lounge along the Loire. There is 
always something refreshing in the companionship of a 
fine river ; and, whatever one may think of its summer 
sands, Loire through the spring and the autumn is a 
very fine river indeed. There is, besides, the pleasant- 
est variety of scenery as one wanders along from the 
sombre granite of Brittany to the volcanic cinder-heaps 
of Auvergne. There is the picturesque contrast between 
the vast dull corn -flats to the north of the great river, 
and the vines and acacias to the south. There is the 
same contrast in an ethnological point of view ; for one 
is traversing the water -shed that parts two different 
races, and enough of difference still remains in dialect 
and manner to sever the Aquitanian from the Frank. 
And, historically, every day brings one across some cas- 
tle or abbey or town that has been hitherto a mere 
name in the pages of Lingard or Sismondi, but which 
one actual glimpse changes into a living fact. There 
are few tracts of country, indeed, where the historical 



312 STRAY STUDIES. 

interest ranges equally over so long a space of time. 
The river which was the "revolutionary torrent" of 
Carrier had been the highway for the Northmen into 
the heart of Caroliugian France. Saumur blends the 
tenth century and the sixteenth together in the names 
of Gelduin and Du Plessis; Chinon brings into contact 
the age of the Plantagenets and the age of Joan of Arc. 
From the mysterious dolmen and the legendary well to 
the stone that marks the fusillade of the heroes of La 
Vendee, there is a continuous chain of historic event in 
these central provinces. Every land has its pet periods 
of history, and the brilliant chapters of M. Michelet are 
hardly needed to tell us how thoroughly France identi- 
ties the splendor and infamy of the Renascence with the 
Loire. Blois, Amboise, Chenonceaux, embody still in the 
magnificence of their ruin the very spirit of Catherine 
de Medicis, of Francis, of Diana of Poitiers. To En- 
glishmen the relics of an earlier period have naturally a 
greater charm. Nothing clears one's ideas about the 
character of the Angevin rule, the rule of Henry II., 
or Richard, or John, so thoroughly as a stroll through 
Anjou. 

There the Angevin counts are as vivid, as real, as 
the Angevin kings are on English soil unreal and dim. 
Hardly a building in his realm preserves the memory of 
Henry II. ; Richard is a mere visitor to English shores ; 
Beaulieu alone, and the graven tomb at Worcester, en- 
able us to realize John. But along the Loire these 



THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS. 313 

Angevin rulers meet us in river -bank, and castle, and 
bridge, and town. Their names are familiar words still, 
through the length and breadth of the land. At An- 
gers men show you the vast hospital of Henry II., while 
the suburb around it is the creation of his son. And 
not only do the men come vividly before us, but they 
come before us in another and a fresher light. To us 
they are strangers and foreigners, stern administrators, 
exactors of treasure; tyrants to whose tyranny, some- 
times just and sometimes unjust, England was destined 
to owe her freedom. But for Anjou, the period of their 
rule was the period of a peace and fame and splendor 
that never came back save in the shadowy resurrection 
under King Rene. Her soil is covered with monuments 
of their munificence, of their genuine care for the land 
of their race. Nine-tenths of her great churches, in the 
stern grandeur of their vaulting, their massive pillars, 
their capitals breaking into the exquisite foliage of the 
close of the century, witness to the pious liberality of 
sovereigns who in England were the oppressors of the 
Church, and who, when doomed to endow a religious 
house in their realm, did it by turning its inhabitants 
out of an already existing one and giving it simply a 
new name. As one walks along the famous Levee, the 
gigantic embankment along the Loire by which Henry 
saved the valley from inundation, or as one looks at his 
hospitals at Angers or Le Mans, it is hard not to feel 
a sympathy and admiration for the man from whom 
one shrinks coldly under the martyrdom at Canterbury. 



314 STRAY STUDIES. 

There is a French side to the character of these kings 
which, though English historians have disregarded it, is 
worth regarding, if only because it really gave the tone 
to their whole life and rule. But it is a side which can 
only be understood when we study these Angevins in 
Anjou. 



To the English traveler Angers is, in point of historic 
interest, without a rival among the towns of France. 
Rouen, indeed, is the cradle of our Norman dynasty, as 
Angers of our Plantagenet dynasty ; but the Rouen of 
the dukes has almost vanished, while Angers remains 
the Angers of the counts. The physiognomy of the 
place — if we may venture to use the term — has been 
singularly preserved. Few towns have, it is true, suffer- 
ed more from the destructive frenzy of the "Revolution ; 
gay boulevards have replaced "the flinty ribs of this 
contemptuous city," the walls which play their part in 
Shakspeare's " King John ;" the noblest of its abbeys has 
been swept away, to make room for a prefecture ; four 
churches were demolished at a blow, to be replaced by 
the dreariest of squares; the tombs of its later dukes 
have disappeared from the cathedral. In spite, how- 
ever, of new faubourgs, new bridges, and new squares, 
Angers still retains the impress of the Middle Ages; its 
steep and narrow streets, its dark, tortuous alleys, the 
fantastic wood-work of its houses, the sombre grimness 
of the slate-rock out of which the city is built, defy even 
the gay audacity of imperialist prefects to modernize 



THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS. 315 

them. One climbs up from the busy quay along the 
Mayenne into a city which is still the city of the counts. 
From Geoffrey Grey gown to John Lackland, there is 
hardly one who has not left his name stamped on 
church, or cloister, or bridge, or hospital. The stern 
tower of St. Aubin recalls, in its founder, Geoffrey him- 
self ; the nave of St. Maurice, the choir of St. Martin's, 
the walls of Roncevray, the bridge over Mayenne, pro- 
claim the restless activity of Fulc Nerra. Geoffrey Mar- 
tel rests beneath the ruins of St. Nicholas, on its height 
across the river. Beyond the walls to the south is the 
site of the burial-place of Fulc Rechin. One can tread 
the very palace halls to which Geoffrey Plantagenet led 
home his English bride. The suburb of Roncevray, 
studded with buildings of an exquisite beauty, is almost 
the creation of Henry Fitz-Empress and his sons. 

But, apart from its historical interest, Angers is a 
mine of treasure to the archaeologist or the artist. In 
the beauty and character of its site it strongly resembles 
Le Mans. The River Mayenne comes down from the 
north, from its junction with the Sarthe, edged on either 
side by low ranges of coteaux, which, approaching it 
nearly on the west, leave room along its eastern bank 
for vast level flats of marshy meadow-land, cut through 
by white roads and long poplar-rows — meadows which 
in reality represent the old river-bed in some remote 
geological age before it had shrunk to its present chan- 
nel. Below Angers the valley widens ; and as the Ma- 



316 STRAY STUDIES. 

yenne coils away to Ponts-de-Ce, it throws out on either 
side broad flats, rich in grass and golden flowers, and 
scored with rhines as straight and choked with water- 
weeds as the rhines of Somersetshire. It is across these 
lower meadows, from the base of the abbey walls of 
St. Nicholas, that one gets the finest view of Angers, the 
colossal mass of its castle, the two delicate towers of the 
cathedral rising sharp against the sky, the stern belfry 
of St. Aubin. Angers stands, in fact, on a huge block 
of slate -rock, thrown forward from one of the higher 
plateaux which edge the marshy meadows, and closing 
up to the river in what was once a cliff as abrupt as 
that of Le Mans. Pleasant boulevards curve away in 
a huge semicircle from the river, and between these 
boulevards and the Mayenne lies the dark old town, 
pierced by steep lanes and break-neck alleys. On the 
highest point of the block and approached by the steep- 
est lane of all stands the Cathedral of St. Maurice, the 
tall slender towers of its western front and the fan- 
tastic row of statues which fill the arcade between them 
contrasting picturesquely enough with the bare grand- 
eur of its interior, where the broad, low vaulting re- 
minds us that we are on the architectural border of 
Northern and Southern Europe. St. Maurice is, in 
the strictest sense, the mother-church of the town. M. 
Michelet has, with singular lucklessness, selected An- 
gers as the type of a feudal city. With the one excep- 
tion of the Castle of St. Louis, it is absolutely without 
a trace of the feudal impress. Up to the Revolution, 



THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS. 317 

it remained the most ecclesiastical of French towns. 
Christianity found the small Koman borough covering 
little more than the space on the height above the 
river afterward occupied by the cathedral precincts, 
planted its church in the midst of it, buttressed it to 
north and south with the great Merovingian abbeys of 
St. Aubin and St. Serge, and linked them together by a 
chain of inferior foundations that entirely covered its 
eastern side. From the river on the south to the river 
on the north, Angers lay ringed in by a belt of priories 
and churches and abbeys. Of the greatest of these, 
that of St. Aubin, only one huge tower remains ; but 
fragments of it are still to be seen imbedded in the 
buildings of the prefecture — above all a Komanesque 
arcade, fretted with tangled imagery and apocalyptic fig- 
ures of the richest work of the eleventh century. The 
Abbey of St. Serge still stands to the north of Angers ; 
its vast gardens and fish-ponds turned into the public 
gardens of the town, its church spacious and beautiful, 
with a noble choir, that may perhaps recall the munifi- 
cence of Geoffrey Martel. Of the rivals of these two 
great houses, two only remain. Portions of the Caro- 
lingian Church of St. Martin, built by the wife of Em- 
peror Louis le Debonnaire, are now in use as a tobac- 
co warehouse ; the pretty ruin of Toussaint, not at all 
unlike our own Tintern, stands well cared for in the 
gardens of the Museum. 

But, interesting as these relics are, it is not ecclesi- 



318 STRAY STUDIES. 

astical Angers that the English traveler instinctively 
looks for ; it is the Angers of the counts, the birthplace 
of the Plantagenets. It is only in their own capital, 
indeed, that we fully understand our Angevin kings, 
that we fully realize that they were Angevins. To an 
English school -boy, Henry II. is little more than the 
murderer of Beket and the friend of Fair Rosamond. 
Even an English student finds it hard, after all the la- 
bors of Professor Stubbs, to lay hold of either Henry or 
his sons. In spite of their versatile ability and of the 
mark which they have left on our judicature, our mu- 
nicipal liberty, our political constitution, the first three 
Plantagenets are to most of us little more than dim 
shapes of strange manner and speech, hurrying to their 
island realm to extort money, to enforce good govern- 
ment, and then hurrying back to Anjou. But there is 
hardly a boy in the streets of Angers to whom the name 
of Henry Fitz-Empress is strange, who could not point 
to the ruins of his bridge or the halls of his hospice, 
tell of the great Levee by which the most beneficent or 
of Angevin counts saved the farmers' fields from the 
floods of the Loire. Strangers in England, the three 
first Plantagenets are at home in the sunny fields along 
the Mayenne. The history of Anjou, the character of 
the counts, their forefathers, are the keys to the subtle 
policy, to the strangely mingled temper, of Henry and 
his sons. The countless robber -holds of the Angevin 
noblesse must have done much toward the steady re- 
solve with which they bridled feudalism in their island 



THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS. 319 

realm. The crowd of ecclesiastical foundations that 
ringed in their Angevin capital hardly failed to imbit- 
ter, if not to suggest, their jealousy of the Church. 

Of the monuments of the counts which illustrate our 
own history, the noblest, in spite of its name, is the 
Bishop's Palace to the north of the Cathedral. The 
residence of the bishop was undoubtedly at first the res- 
idence of the counts, and the tradition which places its 
transfer as far back as the days of Ingelger can hardly 
be traced to any earlier source than the local annalist 
of the seventeenth century. It is at least probable that 
the occupation of the palace by the bishop did not take 
place till after the erection of the castle on the site of 
the original evecM in the time of St. Louis, and this is 
confirmed by the fact that the well-known description 
of Angers by Ralph de Diceto places the Comitial Pal- 
ace of the twelfth century in the north-east quarter of 
the town — on the exact site, that is, of the present epis- 
copal residence. But if this identification be correct, 
there is no building in the town which can compare 
with it in historical interest for Englishmen. The 
chapel beneath, originally perhaps simply the substruct- 
ure of the building, dates from the close of the eleventh 
century ; the fine hall above, with its grand row of win- 
dows looking out upon the court, from the earlier half 
of the twelfth. It was to the building as it actually 
stands, therefore, that Geoffrey Plantagenet must have 
brought home his English bride, Maud the Empress, 



320 STRAY STUDIES. 

the daughter of our Henry I., along the narrow streets 
hung with gorgeous tapestries, and filled with long 
trains of priests and burghers. To Angers that day 
represented the triumphant close of a hundred years' 
struggle with Normandy; to England it gave the line 
of its Plantagenet kings. 

The proudest monuments of the sovereigns who 
sprung from this match, our Henry II. and his sons, lie 
not in Angers itself, but in the suburb across the river. 
The suburb seems to have originated in the chapel of 
Koncevray, the Roman-like masonry of whose exterior 
may date back as far as Fulc Eerra, in the tenth cent- 
ury. But its real importance dates from Henry Fitz- 
Empress. It is characteristic of the temper and policy 
of the first of our Plantagenet kings that in Anjou, as 
in England, no religious house claimed him as its found- 
er. Here, indeed, the papal sentence on his part, in the 
murder of Archbishop Thomas, compelled .him to resort 
to the ridiculous trick of turning the canons out of 
Waltham, to enable him to refound it as a priory of his 
own without cost to the royal exchequer. But in his 
Continental dominions he did not even stoop to the pre- 
tense of such a foundation. No abbey figured among 
the costly buildings with which he adorned his birth- 
place, Le Mans. It was as if in direct opposition to the 
purely monastic feeling that he devoted his wealth to 
the erection of the hospitals at Angers and Le Mans. 
It is a relief, as we have said— a relief which one can 



THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS. 321 

only get here — to see the softer side of Henry's nature 
represented in works of mercy and industrial utility. 

The bridge of Angers, like the bridges of Tours and 
Saumur, dates back to the first of the count-kings. Hen- 
ry seems to have been the Pontifex Maximus of his 
day; while his care for the means of industrial com- 
munication points to that silent growth of the new mer- 
cantile class which the rule of the Angevins did so 
much to foster. But a memorial of him hardly less 
universal is the Lazar-house, or hospital. One of the 
few poetic legends that break the stern story of the An- 
gevins is the tale of Count Fulc the Good, how, journey- 
ing along Loire -side toward Tours, he saw, just as the 
towers of St. Martin's rose before him in the distance, a 
leper full of sores, who put by his offer of alms, and de- 
sired to be borne to the sacred city. Amidst the jibes 
of his courtiers, the good count lifted him in his arms 
and carried him along bank and bridge. As they en- 
tered the town, the leper vanished from their sight, and 
men told how Fnlc had borne an angel unawares. Lit- 
tle of his ancestor's tenderness or poetry lingered in the 
practical utilitarian mind of Henry Fitz- Empress; but 
the simple hospice in the fields by Le Mans, or the grand 
Hospital of St. John in the suburb of Angers, displayed 
an enlightened care for the physical condition of his 
people which is all the more striking that in him and 
his sons it had probably little connection with the usual 
motives of religious charity which made such works 

21 



322 STRAY STUDIES. 

popular in the Middle Ages, but, like the rest of their 
administrative system, was a pure anticipation of mod- 
ern feeling. There are few buildings more complete, 
or more beautiful in their completeness, than the Hos- 
pital of St. John ; the vast hall, with its double row of 
slender pillars, the exquisite chapel, trembling in the 
pure grace of its details on the very verge of Koman- 
esque, the engaged shafts of the graceful cloister. The 
erection of these buildings probably went on through 
the whole reigns of our three Angevin sovereigns ; but 
the sterner and simpler hall, called the Lazar-house be- 
sides, with its three aisles and noble sweep of wide arch- 
es, is clearly of the date of Henry alone. It was occu- 
pied, when I visited it some years ago, as a brewery ; but 
never was brewer more courteous, more genuinely ar- 
chaeological, than its occupant. Throughout these cen- 
tral provinces, indeed, as throughout Normandy, the en- 
lightened efforts of the Government have awakened a 
respect for and pride in their national monuments which 
extend even to the poorest of the population. Few 
buildings of a really high class are now left to ruin and 
desecration as they were twenty years ago ; unfortunate- 
ly, their rescue from the destruction of time is too often 
followed by the more destructive attack of the restorer. 
And in almost every town of any provincial importance 
one may obtain what in England it is simply ridiculous 
to ask for — a really intelligent history of the place it- 
self, and a fair description of the objects of interest 
which it contains. 



THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS. 323 

The broken ruins of the Pont de Treilles, the one low 
tower above the River Mayenne which remains of the 
walls around the suburb of Roncevray, show the price 
which Henry and his sons set on these costly buildings. 
They have a special interest in Angevin history, for 
they were the last legacy of the counts to their capital. 
Across the river, at the south -west corner of the town 
itself, stands the huge fortress that commemorates the 
close of their rule, the castle begun by the French con- 
queror, Philip Augustus, and completed by his descend- 
ant, St. Louis. From the wide flats below Angers, where 
Mayenne rolls lazily on to the Loire, one looks up awed 
at the colossal mass which seems to dwarf even the 
minster beside it, at its dark curtains, its fosse trenched 
deep in the rock, its huge bastions checkered with iron- 
like bands of slate, and unrelieved by art of sculptor or 
architect. It is as if the conquerors of the Angevins 
had been driven to express in this huge monument the 
very temper of the men from whom they reft Anjou, 
their grand, repulsive isolation, their dark, pitiless power. 

It is a relief to turn from this castle to that southern 
fortress which the counts made their home. A glance 
at the flat, tame expanse of Anjou northward of the 
Loire explains at once why its sovereigns made their fa- 
vorite sojourn in the fairer districts south of the river. 
There are few drives more enjoyable than a drive along 
the Yienne to the royal retreat of Chinon. The coun- 
try is rich and noble, deep in grass and maize and corn, 



324 STRAY STUDIES. 

with meadows set in low, broad hedge-rows, and bare, 
scratchy vineyards along the slopes. The road is lined 
with acacias, Tennyson's "milk-white bloom" hanging 
from their tender feathery boughs; and here beneath 
the hot sun of the South the acacia is no mere garden 
shrub, but one of the finest and most graceful of trees. 
Everywhere along the broad sunlit river of Vienne, nat- 
ure is rich and lavish, and nowhere richer or more lav- 
ish than where, towering high on the scarped face of its 
own gray cliff above the street of brown little houses 
edged narrowly in between river and rock, stands the 
favorite home of our Angevin kings. 

It is only in one or two points amidst the great mass 
of stately buildings which is known as the Castle of Chi- 
non that their hand can be traced now. The base of 
the Tour du Moulay, where tradition says the Grand 
Master of the Templars was imprisoned by Philippe le 
Bel, is a fine vault of twelfth-century date, which may 
have been the work of Henry II., and can hardly be 
later than his sons. But something of its original char- 
acter as a luxurious retreat lingers still in the purpose 
to w T hich the ground within the walls has been devoted ; 
it serves as a garden for the towns-folk of Chinon, and 
is full of pleasant, shadowy walks and flowers, and gay 
with children's games and laughter. And, whatever else 
may have changed, the same rich landscape lies around 
that Henry must have looked on when he rode here to 
die, as we look on it now from the deep, recessed win- 



THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS. 325 

dows of the later hall where Joan of Arc stood before 
the disguised Dauphin. Beneath is the broad, bright 
Vienne coming down in great gleaming curves from 
Isle-Bouchard, and the pretty spire of St. Maurice, Hen- 
ry's own handiwork perhaps, soaring lightly out of the 
tangled little town at our feet. Beyond, broken with 
copse and hedge -row and cleft by the white road to 
Loudun, rise the slopes of Pavilly, leading the eye round, 
as they may have led the dying eye of the king, to the 
dim blue reaches of the west where Fontevraud await- 
ed him. 

No scene harmonizes more thoroughly than Fonte- 
vraud with the thoughts which its name suggests. A 
shallow valley, which strikes away southward through 
r, break in the long cliff -wall along the Loire, narrows, 
as it advances, into a sterner gorge, rough with forest 
greenery. The gray escarpments of rock that jut from 
the sides of this gorge are pierced here and there with 
the peculiar cellars and cave-dwellings of the country ; 
and a few rude huts which dot their base gather, as the 
road mounts steeply through this wilder scenery, into a 
little lane of cottages that forms the village of Fonte- 
vraud. But it is almost suddenly that the great abbey 
church round which the village grew up stands out in 
one colossal mass from the western hill-slope ; and in its 
very solitude and the rock-like grandeur of its vast nave, 
its noble apse, its low central tower, there is something 
that marks it as a fit resting-place for kings. Nor does 



326 STKAY STUDIES. 

its present use as a prison-chapel jar much on those who 
have grown familiar with the temper of the early Plan- 
tagenets. At the moment of my visit, the choir of con- 
victs were practicing the music of a mass in the eastern 
portion of the church, which, with the transepts, has 
now been set apart for divine service ; and the wild 
grandeur of the music, unrelieved by any treble, seemed 
to express in a way that nothing else could the spirit of 
the Angevins. " From the devil we come, and to the 
devil we go," said Richard. In spite of the luckless res- 
toration to which their effigies have been submitted — 
and no sight makes us long more ardently that the " Let 
it alone" of Lord Melbourne had wandered from poli- 
tics into archaeology — it is still easy to read in the faces 
of the two king -counts the secret of their policy and 
their fall. That of Henry II. is clearly a portrait. 
Nothing could be less ideal than the narrow brow, the 
large prosaic eyes, the coarse full cheeks, the sensual 
dogged jaw, that combine somehow into a face far high- 
er than its separate details, and which is marked by a 
certain sense of power and command. No countenance 
could be in stronger contrast with his son's ; and yet in 
both there is the same look of repulsive isolation from 
men. Richard's is a face of cultivation and refinement ; 
but there is a strange severity in the small, delicate 
mouth and in the compact brow of the lion-hearted 
king which realizes the verdict of his day. To a his- 
torical student, one glance at these faces as they lie here 
beneath the vault raised by their ancestor, the fifth 



THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS. - 327 

Count Fulc, tells more than pages of chronicles; but 
Fontevraud is far from being of interest to historians 
alone. In its architectural detail, in its Romanesque 
work, and in its strangely beautiful cinque -cento re- 
vival of the Romanesque, in its cloister and Glastonbury 
kitchen, it is a grand study for the artist or the archaeol- 
ogist ; but these are merits which it shares with other 
French minsters. To an English visitor it will ever 
find its chief attraction in the tombs of the kings. 



CAPRI. 



CAPRI. 



i. 

We can hardly wonder at the love of artists for Ca- 
pri ; for, of all the winter resorts of the South, Capri 
is beyond question the most beautiful. Physically, in- 
deed, it is little more than a block of limestone which 
has been broken off by some natural convulsion from 
the promontory of Sorrento, and changed by the strait 
of blue water which now parts it from the main-land 
into the first of a chain of islands which stretch across 
the Bay of Naples. But the same forces which severed 
it from the continent have given a grandeur and variety 
to its scenery which contrast in a strangely picturesque 
way with the narrowness of its bounds. There are few 
coast-lines which can rival in sublimity the coast-line 
around Capri ; the cliff wall of sheer rock broken only 
twice by little dips which serve as landing-places for 
the island, and pierced at its base by " blue grottoes " 
and " green grottoes " which have become famous from 
the strange play of light within their depths. The 



332 STRAY STUDIES. 

reader of Hans Andersen's ' Improvisatore ' will re- 
member one of these caverns as the scene of its closing 
adventure ; but strange as Andersen's description is, it 
is far less strange than the scene which he sketches, the 
deep -blue light which turns the rocks into turquois 
and emerald, or the silvery look of the diver as he 
plunges into the waves. Twice in their course the 
cliffs reach a height of thirteen hundred feet above the 
sea, but their grandeur is never the barren grandeur of 
our Northern headlands ; their sternest faces are soften- 
ed with the vegetation of the South; the myrtle finds 
root in every cranny, and the cactus clings to the bare 
rock front from summit to base. A cliff wall hardly 
inferior in grandeur to that of the coast runs across the 
midst of the island, dividing it into an upper and a low- 
er plateau, with no means of communication save the 
famous rock stairs, the " Steps of Anacapri," now, alas ! 
replaced by a daring road which has been driven along 
the face of the cliff. 

The upper plateau of Anacapri is cold and without 
any striking points of scenery; but its huge mass 
serves as an admirable shelter to Capri below, and it is 
with Capri that the ordinary visitor is alone concerned. 
The first thing which strikes one is the smallness of the 
place. The whole island is only some four miles long 
and a mile and a half across, and, as we have seen, a 
good half of this space is practically inaccessible. But 
it is just the diminutive size of Capri which becomes 



capei. 333 

one of its greatest charms. It would be hard, in fact, 
to find any part of the world where so much and such 
varied beauty is packed into so small a space. The vis- 
itor who lands from Naples or Sorrento mounts steeply 
up the slopes of a grand amphitheatre flanked on either 
side by the cliffs of St. Michael and Anacapri to the 
white line of the village on the central ridge, with the 
strange Saracenic domes of its church lifted weirdly 
against the sky. Over the crest of this ridge a counter 
valley falls as steeply to the south till it reaches a pla- 
teau crowned with the gray mass of a convent, and 
then plunges over crag and cliff back again to the sea. 
To the east of these central valleys a steep rise of 
ground ends in the ruins of the Palace of Tiberius 
and the great headland which fronts the headland of 
Sorrento. Everywhere the forms of the scenery are 
on the largest and boldest scale. The great conical 
Tors, Tuoro-grande and Tuoro-piccolo, the boldly scarp- 
ed rock of Castiglione, with its crown of medigeval tow- 
ers, lead up the eye to the huge cliff wall of Anacapri, 
where, a thousand feet above, the white hermitage on 
Monte Solaro glimmers out fitfully from its screen of 
cloud. 

Among the broken heights to the east, or in the two 
central valleys, there are scores of different walks and 
a hundred different nooks, and each walk and nook has 
its own independent charm. Steeps clothed from top 
to bottom in the thick greenery of the lemon or orange ; 



334 STRAY STUDIES. 

sudden breaks like that of Metromania, where a blue 
strip of sea seems to have been cunningly let in among 
the rocks ; backgrounds of tumbled limestone ; slopes 
dusty gray with wild cactus; thickets of delightful 
greenery, where one lies hidden in the dense scrub of 
myrtle and arbutus; olive -yards creeping thriftily up 
the hill-sides and over the cliffs and down every slope, 
and into every rock-corner where the Caprese peasant- 
farmer can find footing ; homesteads of gray stone, with 
low -domed Oriental roofs, on which women sit spin- 
ning, their figures etched out against the sky; gardens 
where the writhed fig-trees stand barely waiting for the 
foliage of the spring; nooks amidst broken bowlders 
and vast fingers of rock, with the dark mass of the ca- 
rouba flinging its shade over them ; heights from which 
one looks suddenly northward and southward over a 
hundred miles of sea — this is Capri. The sea is every- 
where. At one turn its waters go flashing away, un- 
broken by a single sail, toward the far-off African coast, 
where the Caprese boatmen are coral -fishing through 
the hot summer months; at another, the eye ranges 
over the tumbled mountain masses above Amalfi to the 
dim sweep of coast where the haze hides the temples of 
Psestum ; at another, the Bay of Naples opens sudden- 
ly before us; Vesuvius and the blue deep of Castella- 
mare, and the white city-line along the coast, seen with 
a strange witchery across twenty miles of clear air. 

The island is a paradise of silence for those to whom 



capri. 335 

silence is a delight. One wanders about in the vine- 
yards without a sound save the call of the vine-dresser ; 
one lies on the cliff, and hears a thousand feet below 
the dreamy wash of the sea. There is hardly the cry 
of a bird to break the spell ; even the girls who meet 
one with a smile on the hill -side smile quietly and 
gravely, in the Southern fashion, as they pass by. It 
is the stillest place that the sun shines on ; but, with 
all its stillness, it is far from being a home of bore- 
dom. There are, in fact, few places in the world so 
full of interest. The artist finds a world of " studies " 
in its rifts and cliff walls, in the sailor-groups along its 
beach and the Greek faces of the girls in its vineyards. 
The geologist reads the secret of the past in its ab- 
ruptly tilted strata, in a deposit of volcanic ash, in the 
fossils and bones which Augustus set the fashion of 
collecting before geology was thought of. The histo- 
rian and the archaeologist have a yet wider field. Capri 
is a perfect treasure-house of Eoman remains; and 
though in later remains the island is far poorer, the 
ruins of mediaeval castles crown the heights of Casti- 
glione and Anacapri; and the mother- church of San 
Costanzo, with its central dome supported on marble 
shafts from the ruins hard by, is an early specimen of 
Sicilian or Southern Italian architecture. Perhaps the 
most remarkable touch of the South is seen in the low 
stone vaults which form the roofs of all the older houses 
of Capri, and whose upper surface serves as a terrace 
where the women gather in the sunshine in a way 



o36 STRAY STUDIES. 

which brings home to one oddly the recollections of 
Syria and Jerusalem. 

For loungers of a steadily un inquiring order, how- 
ever, there are plenty of amusements of a lighter sort. 
It is hard to spend a day more pleasantly than in boat- 
ing beneath the cliffs of Capri, bobbing for " cardinals," 
cruising round the huge masses of the Faraglioni as 
they rise like giants out of the sea, clipping in and out 
of the little grottoes which stud the coast. On land 
there are climbs around headlands and "rock -work" 
for the adventurous; easy little walks, with exquisite 
peeps of sea and cliff, for the idle; sunny little nooks, 
where the dreamer can lie buried in myrtle and arbu- 
tus. The life around one, simple as it is, has the color 
and picturesqueness of the South. The girl-faces which 
meet one on the hill-side are faces such as artists love. 
In the church the little children play about among the 
groups of mothers with orange kerchiefs on their heads 
and heavy silver rings on every finger. Strange proces- 
sions, with cowled faces and crucifix and banners borne 
aloft, sweep into the piazza and up the church steps. 
Old women, with Sibyl-like faces, sit spinning at their 
doors; maidens with water-jars on their heads which 
might have been dug up at Pompeii ; priests with broad 
hats and huge cloaks; sailors with blue shirts and red 
girdles; urchins who almost instinctively cry for a "sol- 
do," and break into the tarantella if you look at them ; 
quiet, grave, farmer -peasants with the Phrygian cap; 



capri. 337 

coral -fishers fresh from the African coast, with tales 
of storm and tempest, and the Madonna's help, make 
up group after group of Caprese life as one looks idly 
on — a life not specially truthful, perhaps, or moral or 
high-minded, but sunny and pleasant and pretty enough, 
and harmonizing in its own genial way with the sun- 
shine and beauty around. 

Its rough inns, its want of English doctors, the dif- 
ficulties of communication with the main -land, from 
which its residents are utterly cut off in bad weather, 
make Capri an unsuitable resort for invalids, in spite 
of a climate which, if inferior to that of Catania, is 
distinctly superior to that of either San Eemo or Men- 
tone. Those who remember the Riviera with no little 
gratitude may still shrink from the memory of its 
sharp transitions of temperature, the chill shade into 
which one plunges from the direct heat of its sun-rays, 
and the bitter cold of its winter nights. Out of the 
sun, indeed, the air of the Riviera toward Christmas is 
generally keen ; and a cloudy day, with an east wind 
sweeping along the shore, will bring back most un- 
pleasant reminiscences of the England which one has 
left behind. 

Capri is no hotter, perhaps, in the sunshine, but it is 
distinctly warmer in the shade. The wraps and shawls 
which are a necessity of health at San Remo or Men- 
tone are far less necessary in the South. One may live 

22 



838 STRAY STUDIES. 

frankly in the open air in a way which would hard- 
ly be safe elsewhere, and it is just life in the open air 
which is most beneficial to invalids. It is this natural 
warmth which tells on the temperature of the nights. 
The sudden change at sunset, which is the terror of the 
Riviera, is far less perceptible at Capri ; indeed, the 
average night temperature is but two degrees lower 
than that of the day. The air, too, is singularly pure 
and invigorating, for the village and its hotels stand 
some four or five hundred feet above the sea, and there 
are some fairly level and accessible walks along the 
hill-sides. 

At San Remo, or in the eastern bay of Mentone, one 
purchases shelter by living in a tea -cup, and the only 
chance of exercise lies in climbing up its sides. But it 
must fairly be owned that these advantages are accom- 
panied by some very serious drawbacks. If Capri is 
fairly free from the bitter east wind of the Riviera, the 
Riviera is free from the stifling sirocco of Capri. In 
the autumn and in the earlier part of the winter this is 
sometimes almost intolerable. The wind blows straight 
from Africa, hot, dusty, and oppressive, in a strange and 
almost indescribable way. All the peculiar clearness 
of the atmosphere disappears ; one sees every feature of 
the landscape as one would see it through a raw au- 
tumn day in England. The presence of fine dust in 
the air — the dust of the African desert, to which this 
effect is said to be owing — may perhaps account for 



capri. 339 

the peculiar oppressiveness of the sirocco ; certain it 
is, that after two days of it every nerve in the body 
seems set ajar. Luckily, however, it only lasts for three 
days, and dies down into rain as the wind veers round 
to the west. 



CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS. 



ii. 

Among the many charms of Capri must be counted 
the number and interest of its Roman remains. The 
whole island is, in fact, a vast Roman wreck. Hill-side 
and valley are filled with a mass of debris that brings 
home to one in a way which no detailed description can 
do the scale of the buildings with which it was crowd- 
ed. At either landing-place huge substructures stretch 
away beneath the waves, the relics of moles, of arsenals, 
and of docks; a net-work of roads may still be traced 
which linked together the ruins of imperial villas ; ev- 
ery garden is watered from Roman cisterns. Dig where 
he will, the excavator is rewarded by the discovery of 
vases, of urns, of fragments of sculpture, of mosaic pave- 
ments, of precious marbles. Every peasant has a hand- 
ful of Roman coins to part with for a few soldi. The 
churches of the island and the royal palaces of the 
main -land are fall of costly columns which have been 
removed from the ruins of Capri ; and the Museum of 



CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS. 341 

Naples is largely indebted for its treasures of statuary 
to the researches made here at the close of the last cent- 
ury. The main archaeological interest of the island, 
however, lies not in fragments or "finds" such as these, 
but in the huge masses of ruin which lie scattered so 
thickly over it. The Pharos which guided the Alexan- 
drian corn-ships to Puteoli stands shattered on one of its 
headlands. The waves dash idly against an enormous 
fragment of the sea-baths of Tiberius. His palace-cita- 
del still looks from the summit of a mighty cliff across 
the Straits of Sorrento. The Stairs of Anacapri, which, 
in the absence of any other date to which it is possible 
to assign them, we are forced to refer to the same pe- 
riod of construction, hewn as they were to the height of 
a thousand feet in the solid rock, vied in boldness with 
almost any achievement of Roman engineering. The 
smallness of the space — for the lower part of the island 
within which these relics are crowded is little more than 
a mile and a half either way — adds to the sense of won- 
der which the size and number of these creations excite. 
All that remains, too, it must be remembered, is the 
work of but a few years. There is no ground for be- 
lieving that any thing of importance was added after 
the death of Tiberius, or begun before the old age of 
Augustus. 

We catch glimpses, indeed, of the history of the island 
long before its purchase by the aged emperor. Its com- 
manding position at the mouth of the great Campanian 



342 STRAY STUDIES. 

Bay raised it into importance at a very early period. 
The Teieboes, whom tradition named as its first inhab- 
itants, have left only a trace of their existence in the 
verse of Yirgil ; but in the great strife between the Hel- 
lenic and Tyrrhenian races for the commercial monopo- 
ly of Southern Italy, Capri, like Sorrento, was seized as 
a naval station by the Etruscans, whose alliance with the 
Phoenicians, in their common war against the Greeks, 
may, perhaps, explain the vague legends of a Semitic 
settlement on the island. The Hellenic victory of Cumse, 
however, settled the fate of Capri, as it settled the fate 
of the coast ; and the island fell to the lot of Neapolis 
when the " new city " rose in the midst of the bay to 
which it has since given its name. The most enduring 
trace of its Greek colonization is to be found in the 
Greek type of countenance and form which endears 
Capri to artists ; but, like the cities of the main-land, it 
preserved its Greek manners and speech long after it 
had passed with Neapolis into the grasp of Rome. The 
greater proportion of its inscriptions, even when dating 
from the imperial period, are in Greek. Up to the time 
of Augustus, however, it played in Roman story but the 
humble part of lighting the great corn-fleet from Egypt 
through the Strait of Sorrento. Statius tells us of the 
joy with which the sailors welcomed the glare of its 
Pharos as they neared the land, the greeting they ad- 
dressed to its cliff, while, on the other hand, they poured 
their libations to the goddess whose white temple gleam- 
ed from the headland of Sorrento. Its higher destinies 



CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS. 343 

began with a chance visit of Augustus when age and 
weakness had driven him to seek a summer retreat on 
the Campanian shore. A happy omen, the revival of a 
withered ilex at his landing, as well as the temperate 
air of the place itself, so charmed the emperor that he 
forced Naples to accept Ischia in exchange for it, and 
chose it as his favorite refuge from the excessive heat. 
Suetonius gives a pleasant gossiping picture of the old 
man's life in his short holidays there ; his delight in idly 
listening to the prattle of his Moorish and Syrian slave- 
boys as they played knuckle-bones on the beach ; his en- 
joyment of the cool breeze which swept through his 
villa even in summer, or of the cool plash of water from 
the fountain in the peristyle ; his curiosity about the big 
fossil bones dug up in the island, which he sent to Home 
to be placed in the galleries of his house on the Pala- 
tine ; his fun in quizzing the pedants who followed him 
by Greek verses of his own making. But, in the midst 
of his idleness, the indefatigable energy which marked 
the man was seen in the buildings with which Suetonius 
tells us he furnished the island, and the progress of 
which after his death may possibly have been the in- 
ducement which drew his successor to its shores. 

It is with the name of the second Caesar rather than 
of the first that Capri is destined to be associated. 
While the jests and Greek verses of Augustus are for- 
gotten, the terrible invective of Tacitus and the sarcasm 
of Juvenal recall the cruelties and the terrors of Tibe- 



344 STRAY STUDIES. 

rius. His retirement to Capri, although, as we have 
seen, in form but a carrying-out of the purpose of Au- 
gustus, marks a distinct stage in the development of 
the empire. For ten years, not Rome, but an obscure 
island off the Campanian coast became the centre of 
the government of the world. The spell of the Eternal 
City was suddenly broken, and it was never thorough- 
ly restored. If Milan, Ravenna, Nicomedia, Constanti- 
nople, became afterward her rivals or supplanters as 
the seat of empire, it was because Capri had led the 
way. For the first time, too, as Dean Merivale has 
pointed out, the world was made to see, in its bare 
nakedness, the fact that it had a single master. All 
the disguises which Augustus had flung around his per- 
sonal rule were cast aside ; senate, consuls, the Roman 
people itself, were left contemptuously behind. A sin- 
gle senator, a few knights, a little group of Greek schol- 
ars, were all that accompanied Tiberius to Capri. The 
figure of the emperor stood out bare and alone on its 
solitary rock. But great as the change really was, the 
skill of Tacitus has thrown over the retirement of Tibe- 
rius a character of strangeness which, as we have said, 
hardly belongs to it. What, in fact, distinguished it 
from the retirement of Augustus to the same spot was 
simply the persistence of his successor in never return- 
ing to Rome. 

Capri in itself was nothing but a part of the great 
pleasure resort which Roman luxury had created round 



CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS. 345 

the shores of the Bay of Naples. From its cliffs the 
emperor could see through the pure, transparent air the 
villas and watering-places which fringed the coast from 
Misenum to Sorrentum, the groves and lakes of Baise, 
the white line of Neapolis, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, 
the blue sea, dappled with the painted sails of pleasure- 
boats as they wooed the summer air. The whole bay 
was a Eoman Brighton, and the withdrawal of Tiberius 
from the world was much the same sort of withdrawal 
from the world as the seclusion of George IV. at the 
Pavilion. Of the viler pleasures which are commonly 
attributed to him in his retreat we need say nothing, 
for it is only by ingenious conjectures that any of the 
remains at Capri have been made to confirm them. 
The taste of Tiberius was as coarse as the taste of his 
fellow-Romans ; and the scenes which were common at 
Baise — the drunkards wandering along the shore, the 
songs of the revelers, the drinking-toasts of the sailors, 
the boats with their gaudy cargo of noisy girls, the 
coarse jokes of the bathers among the rose-lea ves which 
strewed the water — were probably as common in the 
revels at Capri. But for the more revolting details of 
the old man's life we have only the scandal of Rome 
to rely on, and scandal was easily quickened by the veil 
of solitude and secrecy which Tiberius flung around his 
retirement. The tale of his cruelties, of the fisherman 
tortured for having climbed the cliff which the emperor 
deemed inaccessible, of criminals dashed into the sea 
down the steep of the " Salto di Timberio," rest on the 



3-±6 STRAY STUDIES. 

gossip of Suetonius alone. But in all this mass of gos- 
sip there is little that throws any real light on the char- 
acter of the island, or of the buildings whose remains 
excite our interest there; we can only guess at its far 
wilder condition from a story which shows us the im- 
perial litter fairly brought to a stand-still by the thick 
brush-wood, and the wrath of Tiberius venting itself in 
a ruthless thrashing of the centurion who served as 
his guide. The story is curious, because it shows 
that, in spite of the rapidity with which the imperial 
work had been carried on, the island, when Tiberius 
arrived, was still, in many parts hidden with rough and 
impenetrable scrub, and that the wonderful series of 
hanging gardens which turned almost the whole of it 
into a vast pleaure-ground was mainly of his own crea- 
tion. ^ 

It would, of course, be impossible to pass in review 
the numberless sites where either chance or research 
has detected traces of the work of Tiberius. " Duodecim 
villarum nominibus et molibus insederat," says Tacitus ; 
and the sites of the twelve villas may in most cases be 
identified to-day ; some basking in the sunshine by the 
shore, some placed in sheltered nooks where the cool 
sea-breeze tempered the summer heat, the grander ones 
crowning the summit of the hills. "We can trace the 
docks of the Roman island: the grottoes still paved 
with mosaic, which marks them as the scene of imperial 
picnics ; the terraces and arbors of the hanging gardens, 



CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS. 347 

with the rock boldly cut away to make room for them ; 
the system of roads which linked the villas together; 
the cisterns and aqueducts which supplied water; the 
buildings for the slaves of the household, and for the 
legionaries who guarded the shore; the cemetery for 
the dead ; the shrines and pavilions scattered about on 
the heights, and a small Mithraic temple hidden in the 
loveliest of the Caprese ravines. If we restore in fancy 
the scene to which these ruins belonged, fill the gardens 
witli the fountains and statues whose fragments lie pro- 
fusely scattered about, rear again the porticoes of mar- 
ble columns, and restore the frescoes whose traces exist 
on the ruined walls, we shall form some inadequate con- 
ception of the luxury and grace which Tiberius flung 
around his retirement. 

By a singular piece of good fortune, the one great 
wreck which towers above all the rest is the spot with 
which the emperor himself is historically associated. 
Through the nine terrible months during which the con- 
spiracy of Sejanus was in progress, he never left, Sueto- 
nius tells us, the Yilla Jovis ; and the villa still stands 
on a huge promontory, fifteen hundred feet above the 
sea, from which his eye could watch every galley that 
brought its news of good or ill from Misenum and from 
Rome. Few landscapes can compare in extent or beau- 
ty with the view on which Tiberius looked. The prom- 
ontory of Massa lies across the blue reach of sea, almost, 
as it seems, under one's hand, yet really a few miles off, 



o48 STRAY STUDIES. 

its northern side falling in brown slopes, dotted with 
white villas, to the orange-gardens of Sorrento, its south- 
ern rushing steeply down to the hidden bays of Amain* 
and Salerno. To the right, the distant line of Apen- 
nine, broken by the shadowy dip that marks the plain 
of Psestnm, runs southward in a dim succession of capes 
and headlands ; to the left, the sunny bow of the Bay 
of Naples gleams, clear and distinct, through the brill- 
iant air, till Procida and Ischia lead the eye round again 
to the cliff of Anacapri, with the busy little Marina at 
its feet. A tiny chapel in charge of a hermit now 
crowns the plateau which forms the highest point of the 
Yilla Jo vis; on three sides of the height the cliff falls 
in a sheer descent of more than a thousand feet to the 
sea ; on the fourth, the ten-ace walls are formed of f rag- 
ments of brick and marble, which recall the hanging 
gardens that swept downward to the plain. The villa 
itself lies partly hewed out of the sides of the steep rock, 
partly supported by a vast series of substructures whose 
arched vaults served as water -reservoirs and baths for 
the service of the house. 

In strength of site and in the character of its de- 
fenses, the palace was strictly what Pliny calls it, " Ti- 
berii principis arx ;" but this was no special character- 
istic of the Yilla Jovis. " Scias non villas esse, sed cas- 
tra," said Seneca of the luxurious villas on the coast of 
Baise. It was as if the soldier element of the Roman 
nature broke out even amidst the patrician's idlest re- 



CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS. 3-A9 

pose in the choice of a military site, and the warlike 
strength of the buildings he erected on it. Within, how- 
ever, life seems to have been luxurious .enough. The 
ruins of a theatre, whose ground -plan remains perfect, 
show that Tiberius combined more elegant relaxations 
with the coarse revels which are laid to his charge. 
Each passage is paved with mosaic, the walls still retain 
in patches their colored stucco, and here and there, in 
the small chambers, we find traces of the designs which 
adorned them. It is, however, rather by the vast extent 
and huge size of the substructures than by the remains 
of the house itself that we can estimate the grandeur of 
the Villa Jovis ; for here, as at the baths near the Mari- 
na, the ruins have served as quarries for chapels and 
forts, and every farm-house in the neighborhood. The 
baths stand only second in grandeur to the villa itself. 
The fall of the cliff has torn down fragment after fra^- 
ment; but the half of an immense calidarium still 
stands like an apse fronting the sea; a grand sea-wall 
juts out into the waves ; and at its base, like a great ship 
of stone in the midst of the water, lies still unbroken, 
after, eighteen hundred years, the sea-bath itself. The 
roof has fallen in, the pillars are tumbled from its front ; 
but the high walls, though undermined by the tide, still 
stand erect. On the cliff above, a Roman fortress which 
must have resembled Burgh Castle in form, and which 
has since served as a modern fort, seems to have pro- 
tected the baths and the vast series of gardens which 
occupied the whole of the lower ground beneath the 



350 STRAY STUDIES. 

Stair of Anacapri, and whose boundary wall remains in 
a series of some twenty almost perfect arches. 

The importance of these remains has long been un- 
derstood by the archaeologists of Italy, and something 
of their ruin may be attributed to the extensive excava- 
tions made by the Government of Naples a hundred 
years ago. But far more of the terrible wreck is owing 
to the ravages of time. With the death of Tiberius, 
Capri sinks suddenly out of sight. Its name had, in 
fact, become associated with infamy, and there is no 
real ground for supposing that it remained as the pleas- 
ure-isle of later emperors. But the vast buildings can 
only slowly have moldered into decay. We find its 
Pharos flaming under Domitian ; and the exile of two 
Eoman princesses, Crispina and Lucilla, by Commodus, 
proves that imperial villas still remained to shelter them. 
It is to the period which immediately follows the resi- 
dence of Tiberius that we may refer one of the most 
curious among the existing monuments of Capri, the 
Mithraic temple of Metromania. Its situation is singu- 
lary picturesque. A stair cut in the rock leads steeply 
down a rift in the magnificent cliffs to the mouth of a 
little cave, once shrouded by a portico whose fragments 
lie scattered among the cacti and wild thyme. With- 
in, the walls are lined with the characteristic reticulated 
Roman masonry ; broken chambers and door-ways on 
either side are blocked by debris ; and two semicircular 
platforms rise, one within the other, to a niche in the 



CAPRI AND ITS KOMAN REMAINS. 351 

farthest recess of the cave where the bass-relief of the 
Eastern deity, which is now deposited in the Museum 
at Naples, was found by the excavators. Beside it lay 
a stone with a Greek inscription so strangely pathetic 
that it must tell its own tale: "Welcome into Hades, 

noble deities — dwellers in the Stygian land — welcome 
me, too, most pitiful of men, ravished from life by no 
judgment of the Fates, but by a death sudden, violent — 
the death-stroke of a wrath defiant of justice. But now 

1 stood in the first rank beside my lord ! now he has reft 
me, and my parents alike, of hope ! I am not fifteen ; 
I have not reached my twentieth year, and — wretched 
I — I see no more the light! My name is Hypatus; but 
I pray my brother and my parents to weep for wretch- 
ed ones no more." Conjecture has coupled this wail 
of a strange fate with the human sacrifices offered at 
the shrine of Mithras, and has seen in Hypatus a slave 
and favorite of Tiberius devoted by his master to the 
Eastern deity; but there is no ground whatever for 
either of the guesses. 

Such as it is, however, the death -cry of Hypatus 
alone breaks the later silence of Capri. The introduc- 
tion of Christianity was marked by the rise of the 
mother church of San Costanzo, whose inner columns 
of giallo antico and cipollino were torn from the ruins 
of the baths hard by ; and from this moment we may 
trace the progress of destruction in each monument of 
the new faith. The sacrarium of San Stefano is paved 



352 STRAY STUDIES. 

with a mosaic of marbles from the Villa Jovis, and the 
Chapel of St. Michael is erected out of a Roman build- 
ing which occupied its site. We do not know when 
the island ceased to form a part of the imperial estate ; 
but the evidence of a charter of Gregory II., overlook- 
ed by the local topographers, shows that at the opening 
of the eighth century the "Insula Capreae cum monas- 
terio St. Stefani " had passed, like the rest of the impe- 
rial property in the South, to become part of the de- 
mesne of the Roman See. The change may have some 
relation to the subjection of Capri to the spiritual juris- 
diction of Sorrento, of whose bishopric it formed a part 
till its own institution as a separate see in the tenth 
century. The name of the " Bishop of Quails," which 
attached itself to the prelate of Capri, points humorous- 
ly to the chief source of his episcopal income, the rev- 
enue derived from the capture of the flocks of these 
birds who settle on the island in their two annual mi- 
grations in May and September. From the close of 
the ninth century, when the island passed out of the 
hands of Amalfi, it has followed the fortunes of the 
main-land ; its ruin seems to have been completed by 
the raids of the Saracens from their neighboring settle- 
ment on the coast of Lucania ; and the two mediaeval 
fortresses of Anacapri and Castiglione, which bear the 
name of Barbarossa, simply indicate that the Algerian 
pirate of the sixteenth century was the most dreaded 
of the long train of Moslem marauders who had made 
Capri their prey through the Middle Ages. Every raid 



CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS. 353 

and every fortress removed some monument of the Ro- 
man rule, and the fight which wrested the isle from Sir 
Hudson Lowe at the beginning of the present century 
put the coping-stone on the work of destruction. But, 
in spite of the ravages of time and of man, enough has 
been left to give a special archaeological interest to the 
little rock-refuge of Capri. 



THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS. 



in. 

The Caprese peasant has never had time to get the 
fact of winter fairly into his head. The cold comes 
year after year, but it comes in a brief and fitful way 
that sets our Northern conceptions at defiance. The 
stranger who flies for refuge to the shores of the little 
island in November may find himself in a blaze of al- 
most tropical sunshine. If a fortnight of dull weather 
at the opening of December raises hopes of an English 
Christmas, they are likely to be swept away by a return 
of the summer glory for a month. Far away over the 
sea, the crests of the Abrnzzi range lift themselves white 
against the sky ; but February has almost come before 
winter arrives, fitful, windy, rainy, but seldom cold, even 
when the mistral, so dreaded on the Riviera, comes 
sweeping down from the north. March ought, by Ca- 
prese experience, to be the difficult month ; but " Marzo 
e pazzo," say the loungers in the little piazza, and some- 
times even the " madness " of March takes the form of 
a delicious lunacy of unbroken sunshine. Corn is al- 



THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS. 355 

ready rippling under the olives ; leaf -buds run like little 
jets of green light along the brown vine-stems ; the gray, 
weird fig -branches are dotted with fruit; women are 
spinning again on the housetops ; boys are playing with 
the birds they have caught in the myrtles; the bright 
shore across the bay is veiled in a summer haze, and 
winter is gone. It is hard to provide in English fashion 
against such a winter as this, and the Capri fisherman 
prefers to regard it as something abnormal, exceptional, 
to be borne with " pazienza" and a shrug of the shoul- 
ders. When the storm-wind blows, he lounges in the 
sunny corner of the piazza; when the rain comes, he 
smokes at home, or mends his nets under the picture of 
the Madonna and the Bambino ; when the cold comes, 
he sits passive and numbed till the cold goes. But he 
knows that the cold will go, and that the rain will pass, 
and that peace will settle down again on the sunny bay ; 
and so, instead of making a fuss about winter, he looks 
on it as a casual little parenthesis in the business of life, 
intensely disagreeable, but, luckily, brief. He sees no 
poetry in it, no beauty of bare wold and folded mist ; he 
hears no music in it like the music of tinkling icicles, 
so dear to Cowper's heart. Christmas itself isn't much 
of a festa in the South, and has none of the mystery 
and home pathos which make it dear to Englishmen. 
There is the presepio in the church, there is the pro- 
cession of the Wise Men at Epiphany-tide ; but the only 
real break to the winter's dullness is the Feast of the 
Coral-fishers. 



356 STRAY STUDIES. 

"What with the poverty of the island and its big fam- 
ilies, it is hard to see how Capri could get along at all 
if it were not for the extra employment and earnings 
which are afforded by the coral -fishery off the African 
coast. Some hundred or two hundred young fellows 
leave the island every spring to embark at Torre del 
Greco in a detachment of the great coral fleet which 
musters at that port, at Genoa, or at Leghorn ; and the 
Sunday before they start — generally one of the last 
Sundays in January — serves as the Feast of the Coral- 
fishers. Long before day -break the banging of big 
crackers rouses the island from its slumbers; and high 
mass is hardly over, when a procession of strange pictur- 
esqueness streams out of church into the sunshine. At 
its head come the " Daughters of Mary," some mere lit- 
tle trots, some girls of sixteen, but all clad in white, 
with garlands of flowers over their veils and girdles of 
red or blue. Behind come the fishermen, young sailor- 
boys, followed by rough, grizzled elders, bearing candles 
like the girls before them, and then the village brother- 
hood, fishers too, but clad in strange garments of gray, 
with black hoods covering their faces, and leaving noth- 
ing but the bright good-humored eye to guide one, un- 
der this sepulchral figure, to the Giovanni or Beppino 
who was cracking jokes yesterday till the Blue Grotto 
rang again. Then beneath a great canopy upborne by 
the four elder fishers of the island, vested in gowns of 
" samite, mystic, wonderful " — somewhat like a doctor 
of music's gown in our unpoetic land — comes the Ma- 



THE FEAST OF THE COEAL-FISHEKS. 357 

donna herself, " La Madonna di Carmela," with a crown 
of gold on her head and a silver fish dangling from her 
fingers. It is the Madonna of Carmel, who disputes 
with San Costanzo, the saint of the mother church be- 
low, the spiritual dominion of Capri. If he is the " Pro- 
tector " of the island, she is its " Protectress.'' The old- 
er and graver sort, indeed, are faithful to their bishop- 
saint, and the loyalty of a vine- dresser in the piazza re- 
mains unshaken, even by the splendor of the procession. 
" Yes, signore !" he replies to a skeptical Englishman 
who presses him hard with the glory of " the Protect- 
ress," " yes, signore, the Madonna is great for the fisher- 
folk; she gives them fish. But fish are poor things, aft- 
er all, and bring little money. It is San Costanzo who 
gives us the wine, the good red wine which is the wealth 
of the island. And so this winter feast of the fishermen 
is a poor little thing beside oxirf esta of San Costanzo in 
the May -time. For the image of our Protector is all 
of silver; and sometimes the bishop comes over from 
Sorrento and walks behind it, and we go all the way 
through the vineyards, and he blesses them ; and then at 
night-fall we have 'bombi' — not such as those of the 
Madonna," he adds, with a quiet shrug of the shoulders, 
" but great bombi and great fire-works at the cost of the 
municipio." 

On the other hand, all the girls go with the fisher- 
folk, in their love of the Madonna. "Ah yes, signore," 
laughs a maiden whose Greek face might have served 



358 STRAY STUDIES. 

Phidias for a model, " San Costanzo is our Protector, 
but he is old, and the Madonna is young — so young and 
so pretty, signore — and she is my Protectress." A fisher- 
man backs up the feminine logic by a gird at the silver 
image, which is evidently the strong point of the oppo- 
site party. The little commune is said to have borrow- 
ed a sum of money on the security of this work of art, 
and the fisherman is correspondingly scornful. " San 
Costanzo owes much, many danari, signore; and it is 
said," he whispers roguishly, " that if they don't pay 
pretty soon, his creditors at Naples will send him to 
prison for the debt of the municipio." But the Madon- 
na has her troubles as well as the saint. Her hair, 
which has been dyed for the occasion, has, unhappily, 
turned salmon color by mistake; but the blunder has no 
sort of effect on the enthusiasm of her worshipers, on 
the canons who follow her in stiff copes, shouting lusti- 
ly, or on the maidens and matrons who bring up the 
rear. Slowly the procession winds its way through the 
little town, now lengthening into a line of twinkling 
tapers as it passes through the narrow alleys which serve 
for streets, now widening out again on the hill - sides 
where the orange kerchiefs and silver ornaments of the 
Caprese women glow and flash into a grand background 
of color in the sun. And then come evening and bene- 
diction, and the fire-works, without which the procession 
would go for nothing, catharine-wheels spinning in the 
piazza, and big crackers bursting amidst a chorus of 
pretty outcries of terror and delight. 



THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS. 359 

Delight, however, ends with the fosta, and the part- 
ing of the morning is a strange contrast, in its sadness, 
with this Sunday joy. The truth is, that coral-fishing is 
a slavery to which nothing but sheer poverty drives the 
fishermen. From April to October their life is a life 
of ceaseless drudgery. Packed in a small boat without 
a deck, with no food but biscuit and foul water, touch- 
ing land only at intervals of a month, and often de- 
prived of sleep for days together, through shortness of 
hands, the coral-fishers are exposed to a constant brutal- 
ity from the masters of their vessels which is too horri- 
ble to bear description. Measured, too, by our English 
notions, the pay of the men seems miserably inadequate 
to the toil and suffering which they undergo. Enough, 
however, remains to tempt the best of the Caprese fish- 
ermen to sea. Even a boy's earnings will pay his moth- 
er's rent. For a young man, it is the only mode in 
which he can hope to gather a sum sufficient for mar- 
riage and his start in life. The early marriages so com- 
mon at Naples and along the adjoining coast are un- 
known at Capri, where a girl seldom weds before twen- 
ty, and where the poorest peasant refuses the hand of 
his daughter to a suitor who can not furnish a wedding 
settlement of some twenty pounds. Even with the 
modern rise of wages, it is almost impossible for a lover 
to accumulate such a sum from the produce of his ordi- 
nary toil, and his one resource is the coral-fishery. 

The toil and suffering of the summer are soon for- 



860 STRAY STUDIES. 

gotten when the young fisherman returns and adds his 
earnings to the little store of former years. When the 
store is complete, the ceremonial of a Caprese betrothal 
begins with " the embassy," as it is termed, of his moth- 
er to the parents of the future bride. Clad in her best 
array, and holding in her hand the favorite nosegay of 
the island — a branch of sweet basil sprinkled with cin- 
namon powder and with a rose-colored carnation in the 
midst of it — the old fish-wife makes her way through 
the dark lanes to the vaulted room where her friends 
await her with a charming air of ignorance as to the 
errand on which she comes. Half an hour passes in 
diplomatic fence, in chat over the weather, the crops, 
or the price of macaroni, till at a given signal the girl 
herself leaves the room, and the "embassadress" breaks 
out in praise of her good looks, her industry, and her 
good repute. The parents retort by praise of the young 
fisherman, compliments pass quickly into business, and 
a vow of eternal friendship between the families is 
sworn over a bottle of rosolio. The priest is soon call- 
ed in, and the lovers are formally betrothed for six 
months — a ceremony which was followed in times past 
by a new appearance of the embassadress with the cus- 
tomary offering of trinkets from the lover to his prom- 
ised spouse. This old Caprese custom has disappeared, 
but the girls still pride themselves on the number and 
value of their ornaments — the "spadella," or stiletto, 
which binds the elaborately braided mass of their ebon 
hair; the circular gold ear-rings, with inner circles of 



THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS. 361 

pearls ; the gold chain, or lacetta, worn, fold upon fold, 
round the neck ; the bunch of gold talismans suspended 
on the breast; the profusion of heavy silver rings which 
load every finger. The Sunday after her betrothal, 
when she appears at high mass in all her finery, is the 
proudest day of a Capri girl's life ; but love has few 
of the tenderer incidents which make its poetry in the 
North. There is no "lover's lane" in Capri, for a 
maiden may not walk with her betrothed save in pres- 
ence of witnesses; and a kiss before marriage is, as 
"Auld Eobin Gray" calls it, "a sin" to which no mod- 
est girl stoops. The future husband is, in fact, busy 
with less romantic matters : it is his business to provide 
bed and bedding, table and chairs, drawers and looking- 
glass, and, above all, a dozen gaudy prints from Naples 
of the Madonna and the favorite saints of the day. 
The bride provides the rest ; and on the eve of the mar- 
riage the families meet once more to take an inventory 
of her contributions, which remain her own property 
till her death. The morning's sun streams in upon the 
lovers as they kneel, at the close of mass, before the 
priest in San Stefano ; all the boyhood of Capri is wait- 
ing outside to pelt the bridal train with confetti as it 
hurries, amidst blushes and laughter, across the piazza ; 
a dinner of macaronj and the island wine ends in a uni- 
versal tarantella ; there is a final walk round the village 
at the close of the dance, and the coral -fisher reaps the 
prize of his toil as he leads his bride to her home. 

THE END. 



A SHORT HISTORY 

OF THE 

ENGLISH PEOPLE. 

By J. R. GREEN, M.A., 

EXAMINER IN THE SCHOOL OF MODERN HISTORY, OXFORD ; AUTHOR OF 
"STRAY STUDIES FROM ENGLAND AND ITALY." 

WITH TABLES AND COLORED MAPS. 
Ckown 8vo, Cloth, $1 75. 

A Library Edition, in Three Volumes, is in Press. 



The history of Mr. Green will be found an able guide to 
every student of history through the latest as well as the 
earliest portions of the political and social life of England ; 
and what we admire most of all is the enthusiasm with 
which, faithful to his principle of peaceful progress and 
internal development, he resists the fascination of the 
shows of outward life, and traces with abounding skill and 
knowledge the social, moral, material, and literary life of 
each period. — London Times. 

We know of no record of the whole drama of English 
history to be compared with it. We know of none that 
is so distinctly a work of genius. * * * It is a really won- 
derful production. There is a freshness and originality 
breathing from one end to the other — a charm of style, 
and a power, both narrative and descriptive, which lifts it 
altogether out of the class of books to which at first sight 
it might seem to belong. The range, too, of subjects, and 
the capacity which the writer shows of dealing with so 
many different sides of English history, witness to powers 
of no common order. And with all this, Mr. Green shows 
throughout that he is on all points up to the last lights, 



2 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 

that he lias made himself thoroughly master both of orig- 
inal authorities and of their modern interpreters. — Pall 
Mall Gazette, London. 

Rightly taken, the history of England is one of the 
grandest human stories, and Mr. Green has so taken it 
that his book should delight the general reader quite as 
much as it delights the student. — Extract from Letter of 
Professor Henry Morley. 

Numberless are the histories of England, and yet until 
now it has been difficult to select any one from the num- 
ber as really and thoroughly satisfactory. This difficulty 
exists no longer. We will not go so far as to pronounce 
Mr. Green's book faultless, but we will say without hesita- 
tion that it is almost a model of what such a book should 
be — so far above any other brief and complete history of 
England that there is no room for comparison. It is first 
of all a history of the English people. * * * The book is, 
therefore, in truth, a history of civilization, but civilization 
regarded in a concrete point of view. Society is not 
treated, after Mr. Buckle's fashion, as growing like a plant 
wholly from an internal development, but all the forces 
which act upon it, as well without as within, are carefully 
and adequately analyzed. The characters of leaders are 
remarkably well described, and their respective influence 
upon history fairly and appreciatively judged. And the 
author has shown rare tact and discrimination in the se- 
lection of his facts, so that the reader never feels himself to 
be put off with commonplace generalities, but to be always 
standing on the firm ground of ascertained and system- 
atized knowledge, while at the same time every line is in- 
teresting reading. — The Nation, N". Y. 

It is hard to know what expressions to use in speaking 
of such a book, for superlatives of admiration would be 
out of place, and yet without them it is difficult to express 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 3 

the full measure of appreciation which it deserves. * * * 
Battles and treaties, though retaining the full importance 
of their position, do not exclude from our sight the really 
more important lesson how society formed itself, how cus- 
toms arose, and laws got settled, and the whole fabric of 
social existence grew. The progress of wealth, the rise 
of commerce, those changes in such external matters as 
architecture and decoration, which betoken a peaceful, 
wealthy, and settled period, after one of self-defence and 
disturbance — all find their due place in the story; nor are 
literature and the arts left out any more than the Spanish 
Armada and the buccaneering heroes of Elizabeth's reign. 
* * * Mr. Green's method is as admirable as his matter. 
He does not torment us with authorities, foot-notes, quota- 
tions, and a full sight of all that scaffolding which we 
know must be employed in the building of every history, 
but which it is surely the historian's business to clear 
away before he opens to us the completed fabric. His au- 
thorities are succinctly named at the head of each section, 
but the narrative is left unbroken for the reader's enjoy- 
ment. — Blackwood's Magazine. 

It will put easily within reach a vast number of 
facts and views which at present are only known to pro- 
fessed historical students. It will familiarize one with 
a thorough and learned treatment of the facts upon which 
political opinions are built. — Athenaeum, London. 

The object of the book, that of combining the history 
of the people with the history of'the kingdom, is most suc- 
cessfully carried out, especially in the earlier part. It 
gives, I think, in the main, a true and accurate picture of 
the general course of English history. It displays through- 
out a firm hold on the subject, and a singularly wide range 
of thought and sympathy. As a composition, too, the 
book is clear, forcible, and brilliant. It is the most truly 



4 HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 

original book of the kind that I ever saw. — Extract from 
Letter of Edward A. Freeman, D.C.L., LL.D., &c., <fce. 

The wealth of material, of learning, thought, and fancy 
which the author has lavished upon it might easily have 
supplied a stately library work of some eight or ten vol- 
umes. Perhaps what most strikes one on a first perusal is 
its character of freshness and originality. — Saturday Re- 
vieio, London. 

It bears marks of great ability in many ways. There is 
a vast amount of research, great skill in handling and ar- 
ranging the facts, a very pleasant and taking style, but 
chief of all a remarkable grasp of the subject — many-sided 
as it is in its unity and integrity — which makes it a work 
of real historical genius. — Extract from Letter of W. 
Stubbs, M.A., Regius Professor of Modem History, 
Oxford. 

To say that Mr. Green's book is better than those which 
have preceded it, would be to convey a very inadequate 
impression of its merits. It is perhaps the highest praise 
that can be given to it that it is impossible to discover 
whether it was intended for the young or for the old. 
— Mr. Samuel R. Gardiner, in the Academy. 

We are not prepared to pronounce Mr. Green's com- 
pendious volume perfect, but we think it is the best 
effort yet made to give to schools the sort of history 
that they need.— Atlantic Monthly. 

It is difficult to speak of this book in any other terms 
than those of unqualified praise. Its learning, its style, 
its imagination, and its sound common-sense, are most, 
remarkable. — North American Review. 

Here in one volume, and at a comparatively trifling 
cost, we have a work which, for wealth of material and 
orderly arrangement and charming diction, takes rank 
with more extended and expensive histories. It will be 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 5 

to the mass of readers a chief attraction of this book 
that it gives less prominence than is usual to kings 
and wars and greater prominence to the English people. 
Constitutional changes, intellectual progress, social re- 
forms, and religious movements constitute the chief 
threads of this admirable fabric. — Congregational Quar- 
terly. 

Here is the book. It is just what has been wanted for 
so long. It is all in one volume of moderate size, in 
which are closely packed the results of long and labori- 
ous study ; it is written in a spirit of admirable candor, 
and, notwithstanding its condensation, it is not a mere 
hand-book, nor has it the air of annals or chronicles. It 
is a history, complete, well planned, and symmetrical. * * * 
Above all, it seems to be thoroughly conscientious and 
exact. Whoever reads this volume through attentively 
will have as complete an understanding of the origin and 
development of the English people and the English gov- 
ernment as most men and women desire to have. * * * 
Of the literary execution of the work we must speak 
with almost unqualified praise. Mr. Green has made 
this compendious history as interesting as if it were a 
series of tales or sketches written only to give pleasure. 
His own style is notably clear, simple, and manly, and his 
vocabulary is rich in right good English. — N. Y. Times. 



Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 

VW Sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States or Canada, 
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